Christian philosophy, and even so to represent things that it may appear as if Christian morality were the natural outcome of their heathen or social philosophy. And they make the attempt, but their very efforts exhibit more clearly than anything else, not only the independence of Christian morality, but its complete contradiction of the philosophy of individual welfare, of escape from personal suffering, of the welfare of society.
Christian ethics, that of which we become conscious by a religious conception of life, demand not only the sacrifice of personality to an aggregate of persons, but of one's own person and any aggregate of persons to the service of God. Whereas, heathen philosophy, investigating the means by which the welfare of the individual or of an association of individuals may be achieved, inevitably contradicts the Christian ideal. Pagan philosophy has but one method for concealing this discrepancy; it heaps up abstract conditional notions, one upon the other, and refuses to emerge from the misty region of metaphysics. Chiefly after this manner was the behaviour of the philosophers since the Renaissance, and to this circumstance—namely, the impossibility of reconciling the demands of Christian morality already recognised as existing, with philosophy upon a heathen basis—one must attribute that awful abstraction, unclearness, incomprehensibility, estrangement from life, of the new philosophy.
