486 SCHLEIERMACHER. duties of love, duties of vocation, and duties of conscience rests on the distinction between community in production and appropriation, each of which may be universal or individual. The most general laws of duty (duty is the Idea of the good in an imperative form) run : Act at every instant with all thy moral power, and aiming at thy whole moral problem ; act with all virtues and in view of all goods, further, Always do that action which is most advan- tageous for the whole sphere of morality, in which two dif- ferent factors are included : Always do that toward which thou findest thyself inwardly moved, and that to which thou findest thyself required from without. Instead of following further the wearisome schematism of Schleier- macher's ethics, we may notice, finally, a fundamental thought which our philosopher also discussed by itself: The sharp contraposition of natural and moral law, advo- cated by Kant, is unjustifiable ; the moral law is itself a law of nature, viz., of rational will. It is true neither that the moral law is a mere " ought " nor that the law of nature is a mere " being," a universally followed " must." For, on the one hand, ethics has to do with the law which human action really follows, and, on the other, there are violations of rule in nature also. Immorality, the imperfect mastery of the sensuous impulses by rational will, has an analogue in the abnormalities — deformities and diseases — in nature, which show that here also the higher (organic) principles are not completely successful in controlling the lower processes. The higher law everywhere suffers disturbances, from the resistance of the lower forces, which cannot be entirely con- quered. It is Schleiermacher's determinism which leads him, in view of the parallelism of the two legislations, to overlook their essential distinction. Adherents of Schleiermacher are Vorlander (died 1867), George (died 1874), the theologian, Richard Rothe (died 1867; cf. Nippold, 1873 seq.), and the historians of philos- ophy, Brandis (died 1867) and H. Ritter (died 1869).*
- W. Dilthey (born 1834), the successor of Lotze in Berlin, is publishing a
life of Schleiermacher (vol. i. 1867-70). Cf. also Dilihey's briefer account in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, and Haym's Romantische SchuU, 1S70 Further, Aus Schleiermachers Leben, in Brief en, 4 vols., 185S-63.
