It seems
to have been assumed that moral principles can be reached by the
application of scientific generalisations or of the results of a
metaphysical analysis which has started by overlooking the facts
of the moral consciousness. Even as a metaphysic this procedure is
inadequate; and the interpretations of reality to which it has led
have erred by over-intellectuality.
The systems of naturalism and of idealism, whose ethical consequences
have been passed in review, have one feature in common; and it is
a feature which from of old has been regarded as a mark of genuine
philosophy. They both seek the One in the many; but they seek it on
different roads. For the naturalist the most comprehensive description
of things may be the conception of mass-points in motion; or it may be
some more recondite conception to which physical analysis points. In
either case the unity reached will be mechanical. For the idealist,
on the other hand, reason may be said to be the central principle of
things: the unity of reality is a rational unity. I have contended in
these lectures that neither the mechanical unity of the naturalists
nor the rational unity of the idealists has succeeded in comprehending
within its unifying principle the essential nature of morality with
its deep-going dualism of good and evil. But while I have maintained
that even the conception of reality as the reproduction of itself by
an eternal self-consciousness is an inadequate conception, it is still
possible to hold that reality is a connected whole, and that its true
principle of unity is an ethical principle.
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