represents for us an absolute entity. It evolves in a direction which may be fortuitous, but which, once taken, cannot be changed. It simultaneously embraces the past, the present, and the future. It is a unity in time, a vast synthesis of which we are but fragments. To be human, means to understand this development, to love it, to trust ones hopes to it, and to endeavour to participate in it consciously. Herein we find an ethical system, which Nicolai sums up as follows:
1. The community of mankind is the divine upon earth, and is the foundation of morals.
2. To be a man is to feel within one's self the reality of humanity at large. It is to feel, like a living law, that we are elements of that greater organism, in which (to quote Saint Paul’s admirable intuition) we are all parts of one body and every one members one of another.
3. The love of our neighbour is a feeling of good health. A general love for humanity is the feeling of organic health in humanity at large, reflected in one of its members. Therefore we should love and honour the human community and everything which sustains and fortifies it—work, truth, good and sound instincts.
4. Fight everything which injures it. Above all, fight bad traditions, instincts that have become useless or harmful.
⁂
“Scio et volo me esse hominem,” writes Nicolai at the close of his book. “I know that I am a man, and I wish to be one.”
Man—he understands by this a being aware of the ties which attach him to the great human family, and aware of the evolution which carries him along with it—a spirit which understands and loves these ties and these laws, and which, submitting to them with delight, thereby becomes free and creative.[1] Man—the term applies to
- ↑ I should like to give an account here of Nicolai's solution of the problem of liberty. He discusses the matter in one of the most important sections of his book.—How can a biologist, filled with a feeling of universal
