VON HARTMANN'S MORAL AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY II.—THE METAPHYSIC.
(A) In the last number of this journal[1] I attempted a critical study of the course of reasoning by which Hartmann arrived at a conception of the ethical end as social development, and also of the course of reasoning by which the process of social development comes to be thought of as subservient to some cosmic or superhuman end. We are in this paper to study the different possible forms of the Metaphysic of Ethics, i.e., the different ways in which philosophy, according to Hartmann, tends to think of the end of human development in connection with the end of the world as a whole. That is, after having tried without complete logical success, to establish the ethical end upon human nature itself, we are about to consider the old attempt to establish morality upon the nature of things—upon the nature of the universe itself. I have no other excuse to offer for this than the plea that, at the close of our argument, our thoughts will be directed not so much towards the abstract nature of the universe in general, as once again upon the realities of conduct, as themselves more calculated to establish a metaphysic than be established by it. Then, too, the question about the why and the wherefore of all human development has an interest on its own account. It is not merely one in which we have become entangled by the difficulties of our preceding attempt. Some people are intolerant of any ethic that is not founded upon a metaphysic. And Hartmann's way of reducing all philosophy to its bitter, its extreme consequences, is at least eminently instructive.
(B) The different forms under which the question of the relation of human development to general or cosmic development is faced by Hartmann are those of (as he puts it); (1) Metaphysical Monism or the principle of the essential identity of all apparently separate and individual persons and things; (2) the Religious Principle, or the identity of man with the Absolute; (3) the Ab-
- ↑ Pp. 465-483.
