use of the word, man belongs to the general scheme of Nature.

This realm of ends or archetypal world, like Leibnitz's City of God, is not the New Testament idea of the Kingdom of God, and instructive contrasts might be drawn between Kant's idea of the archetypal world and that presented in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and also between Kant's unknowable and empty world of things in themselves and the Apostle Paul's conception of the Pleroma. The latter is the only possible foundation for ethic truly Copernican. Jesus Christ is the centre of the moral universe, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.1

Among the other great lights which arose in the German firmament none was greater than Goethe; and this survey of what was meant by the life according to Nature may appropriately close with his opinion. Endowed with a vividness of imagination and exuberance of sentiment greater than Rousseau's, he possessed a sense of the importance of self-discipline lacking in the Frenchman. In some ways, especially in his feeling for the harmonies of Nature, he resembled the English Shaftesbury. But his true lineage, so far as Genius may establish connections with the past, was through Spinoza back to the Italian poet-philosopher Bruno.

Interested in natural science, Goethe expressed to Schiller his dissatisfaction with its analytic methods. It seemed to him that there was a better way of appreciating the meanings of Nature. It ought not to be split up into sections and discussed piecemeal. It was alive and active, " expanding from the whole into the parts." To dissect was to destroy, and post-mortems were not to Goethe's liking.

The

1 The abstract character of Kant's Ethics has often been noted. obvious danger of morality "running to seed along ego-centric lines" has again been pointed out by J. W. Scott, who finds "in the sense of moving with the universe a possible corrective (Kant on the Moral Life, p. 171). But how are we to interpret this phrase in order that we may find in it the essence of moral activity?

So he revived Bruno's intuitive apprehension of Nature as a living unity with emphasis on the idea of evolution. And the whole is immanent in God.

No, such a God my worship may not win,
Who lets the world about His finger spin,
A thing extern: my God must rule within,
And whom I own for Father, God, Creator,
Holds nature in Himself, Himself in nature:
And in His kindly arms embraced, the whole
Doth live and move by His pervading soul.1

To live according to Nature, as so conceived, was for Goethe by wise self-culture to open all the channels through which the immanent life of the universe might expand from the whole into the parts.' This meant much more than mere self-realisation by the development of individual powers and their harmonious co-ordination within the individual himself. It meant sharing in the life of the whole, a whole which was constantly growing and developing. Only mankind as a whole was the perfect man. By struggle and endurance, by work and by play, but especially by love, men might enter into a life much larger than their own, a life which was life indeed.

Counsel and guidance you ask, try this and the other,

Living will teach you to live better than preacher or book.
But that which bridges over the biggest gap

Is love, whose charm binds topmost heaven to earth.3

But this as Haering and others have pointed out, is not the only note struck by Goethe. The man of genius is never merely a light-hearted optimist. Doubts as to the actuality of human progress and the completeness of the redemption gained by mere self-effort and the endurance of a cross were forced upon the seer by the facts of life. Participation in the richest life of the universe is not primarily a human achievement, 1 Blackie's translation in Selections from Goethe. & Ibid.

3 Christian Ethics, p. 102.

but the gift of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. To the mysteries of the new creation Goethe cannot introduce us. But with him we are already passing from the easy optimism of the eighteenth century to the pessimism of the nineteenth, from Pope's lighthearted

For me kind nature wakes her genial power
Suckles each herb and spreads out every flower,

to Tennyson's

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams ?

What is this "Nature" of which the eighteenth century in particular was so enamoured?

St

CHAPTER XIV

THE ETHICS OF NATURE IN THE

NINETEENTH CENTURY

great has been the influence of Kant upon modern thought that one might be inclined to regard most of the types of moral theory in the nineteenth century as developments of various sides of his teaching, or as reactions therefrom. Nevertheless this would not be quite correct. The greatest thinkers are not merely leaders of opinion. Their own thought and work is largely determined by moral influences, which they did not originate, and which they did not fully appropriate or express. English empiricism and German rationalism, Mediæval ideas of law and Protestant ideas of liberty met in Kant, and, meeting, overflowed the great reservoir, which his genius constructed for them.

Yet it is true that not only were various forms of idealistic and voluntaristic morals largely due to the inspiration of his teaching, but naturalistic, vitalistic, and positivist ethics became more sharply defined, and even the mystics, encouraged by him, rejoiced to turn away from the phenomenal to the noumenal and find their home in the supersensible, or perhaps the infrasensible.

It will not be possible in this brief survey to do more than indicate a few of the answers which are suggested by nineteenth-century writers to the question: "What is the life according to Nature?" The five or six adjectives employed above indicate various ways of approach to the problem, but the different tendencies blend so variously in different writers that classifications and labels are of little

use. Unfortunately only a few representative names can be mentioned.

As the nineteenth century was pre-eminently interested in the natural sciences, it seems proper to begin with one or two of the more naturalistic schemes. Even here Kant's influence was indirectly powerful. For in addition to offering men who were dissatisfied with the empiricism of Locke and the scepticism of Hume another theory of ethics, he determined more narrowly the boundaries of the knowable and gave enhanced dignity to scientific method in its own sphere. Natural science became more self-confident. It was the fruit of the "understanding." Outside its province was the region of the unknowable. Agnosticism with regard to anything but the phenomenal or physical became the fashion. Men very generally acquiesced in the new meaning given to the word "knowledge," so that in 1850 even the poet-laureate could say, " For knowledge is of things we see.

John Stuart Mill carried on the traditions of the English utilitarians, Hume, Hartley, Bentham, James Mill and others by adopting their general philosophical standpoint. Sentiency remained the test of truth. But he advanced a long way towards a quite different way of regarding morals, when he abandoned the merely quantitative view of happiness and estimated it according to its quality. The sense of "dignity" which Mill introduced into the idea of happiness is not a concept of natural science, and any ethic which recognises it cannot be purely naturalistic.

Although Mill saw the difficulties in which a mechanical and impersonal view of mind had involved his predecessors, he never emancipated himself from its influence, and he was bound, if consistent, to steer clear of any rational view of Nature. The universe as a rational whole could never be an object of knowledge or experience. It was at best an imaginary construction; but whether real or imaginary, it had for Mill no moral value.

As an empiricist Mill would seem to have had no right to accept Nature as anything but a convenient hypothesis,