as we know it. A moral universe, an absolute moral Being, is the indispensable environment of the ethical life, without which it cannot attain its perfect growth. A first actuality' of goodness, as of intelligence, is the presupposition of, and the only sufficient security for, the perfect actualisation of moral as of intellectual capacity. Philosophy must acknowledge the right of a moral being to self-realisation and completeness of ethical life, and must substantiate his claim upon the universe, whose child he is, that it shall be the medium and not the obstacle and negation of his proper life. This ultimate and inalienable human right is not a 'right to bliss,' 'to welfare and repose,' but a right to self-fulfilment and self-realisation. To deny this right, to invalidate this claim, is either to naturalise, that is, to de-moralise man, or to convict the universe of failure to perfect its own work, to say that, in the end, the part contradicts the whole. Our reasons for dissenting from the former alternative have already been given, and belong to our entire ethical theory; to assent to the latter would be to deny the reality of the universe, and to surrender the possibility of philosophy itself. Accordingly, we seem not only warranted, but compelled, to maintain the moral constitution of the universe. This is, in the words of a recent French writer, "the only hypothesis which explains the totality of phenomena, moral phenomena included, which grasps the harmony between them and us, which gives, with this unity and harmony, clearness to the mind, strength to the will, sweetness to the soul." Fichte's question is most pertinent: "While nothing in nature contradicts itself, is man alone a contradiction?" 2 A moral universe is the ultimate basis of our judgments of moral value, without which the objective validity of these judgments cannot be established.

Ricardou, De l'Idéal, p. 325.

Popular Works, vol. i. p. 346 (Eng. trans.)

The same conclusion is reached by pressing the investigation of the ultimate significance of morality itself. We have seen that the moral life is in its essence an ideal life a life of aspiration after the realisation of that which is not yet attained, determined by the unceasing antithesis of the 'is' and the ought-to-be.' What, then, we are forced at last to ask, is the source and warrant of this moral ideal, of this imperious' ought-tobe'? To answer that it is entirely subjective, the moving shadow of our actual attainment, would be irrevocably to break the spell of the ideal, and to make it a mere foolish will-o'-the-wisp which, once discovered, could cheat us no longer out of our sensible satisfaction with the actual. An ideal, with no foothold in the real, would be the most unsubstantial of all illusions. As Dr Martineau has strikingly said: "Amid all the sickly talk about ideals' which has become the commonplace of our age, it is well to remember that, so long as they are dreams of future possibility, and not faiths in present realities, so long as they are a mere self-painting of the yearning spirit, they have no more solidity or steadiness than floating air-bubbles, gay in the sunshine, and broken by the passing wind." What is needed to give the ideal its proper dignity and power is "the discovery that your gleaming ideal is the everlasting real, no transient brush of a fancied angel wing, but the abiding presence and persuasion of the Soul of souls." 1 The secret of the power of the moral ideal is the conviction which it carries with it that it is no mere ideal, but the expression, more or less perfect, and always becoming more perfect, of the supreme reality; that "the rule of right, the symmetries of character, the requirements of perfection, are no provincialisms of this planet; they are known among the stars; they reign beyond Orion and

1 Study of Religion, vol. i. p. 12. Cf. Ricardou, De l'Idéal, p. 262: “It is not enough that the ideal charm the imagination by its poetry; it is necessary that it satisfy the reason by its truth, its objective and absolute truth."

the Southern Cross; they are wherever the universal Spirit is." The entire preceding discussion serves to show that to make morality entirely relative and subjective, to give a merely empirical evolution of it, is to destroy its inner essence, and to miss its characteristic note. That note is the ideal, without whose constant presence and operation moral development would be impossible. But we have reserved the question of the origin and warrant of the ideal itself; and when we ask it to produce its certificate of birth, it is compelled to refer us to the nature of things, and to proclaim that the way in which it has commanded us to walk is the way of the cosmos itself, the way of the divine order.

Thus an adequate interpretation of morality compels us to predicate an ultimate and absolute moral reality, a supreme ground of goodness as well as of truth; and the moral idealism which we have maintained against empirical realism in ethics brings us in the end to a moral realism, to a conviction of the reality of the moral ideal. We are driven to the conclusion that the ideal is not simply the unreal, but the expression and exponent of the real; that what on our side of it is the ideal is, on its further side, the real; that behind the 'ought' lies the 'is,' behind our insistent 'ought-to-be' the eternalI am' of the divine righteousness. But that supreme moral Reality we can only apprehend on this, its human side; its further side we may not see. "No man shall see God's face and live"; the full vision would scorch man's little life in the consuming fire of the divine perfection. To see God, we must be like him; it is a moral rather than an intellectual apprehension. Yet, as we obey the 'ought-to-be,' and realise in ourselves the ideal good, we do in our human measure and in our appropriate human way come to the fuller knowledge of the divine goodness. The veil that hides it from us, the veil of our own failure and imperfec1 Martineau, op. cit., vol. i. p. 26.

tion, is gradually taken away, and "the pure in heart see God."

To make the antithesis between the ideal and the real final, and to refuse to recognise the reality of the ideal, is to betray a radical misunderstanding of the ideal and of its relation to the real. We must distinguish carefully between the real and the actual, between the absolute and eternal real and the empirical and historical actual. The ideal is, as such, always opposed to the actual; but this does not prevent its being the exponent of the real. Whence comes the ideal of the actual but from the reality or true being of the actual itself? Thus the ideal brings us nearer to reality than the actual; the one is a more perfect, the other a less perfect, expression of the single reality in relation to which both stand, and out of relation to which the distinction between them would disappear. For that distinction must be interpreted as having an objective, and not merely a subjective, basis and significance. The criticism of the actual, if it is to be valid, must be objectively grounded or warranted. "The ideal, founded upon the reasoned and positive knowledge of the essential nature of being, is at once true and possible; it is superior, not contrary, to the actual fact; in a sense it is truer than fact itself; for it is fact purified and transformed, such as it would be if nothing opposed its development; it is reality tending to its complete actualisation.” 1 The ideal is, truly understood, the mirror in which we see reflected at once the real and the actual; it is founded in the real, and is at the same time and for that reason the heart and truth of the actual. The ideal or potential is not simply what the actual is not, it is also the prophecy and guarantee of what the actual shall be, nay, the revelation of what in its essence it is its very being, its rí

1 Ricardou, De l'Idéal, p. 22. Cf. Edward Caird, Evolution of Religion, vol. ii. p. 229: "The ideal reveals itself as the reality which is hid beneath the immediate appearance of things."

ἦν εἶναι. The 'ought' of morality is the dictation of the ethical whole to its parts; for the true nature of the parts is determined by the nature of their common whole. It is only the empiricist who subordinates the ideal to the actual; who sees in the actual the only real, and in the whole only the sum of the parts. But evolution itself, in its philosophical if not in its scientific sense, should teach us to find the real always in, or rather behind, the ideal; never in, but always ahead of, the actual. The empirical time-process, if it has a meaning, implies an eternal reality—a being of the becoming, a something that becomes, the beginning and the end of the entire process of development. The process is the evolution, the gradual unfolding or appearing, of that essential reality which is its constant implication.

9. The personality of God.-Such an interpretation of moral reality, as only the other side of the moral ideal, enables us to be faithful to the great Kantian principle of the essential autonomy of the moral life. It is a principle divined by other moralists, by Plato and Butler especially, that man cannot properly acknowledge subjection to any foreign legislation, but is for ever a law unto himself, his own judge, at once subject and sovereign in the moral realm. But the Kantian autonomy is not a final explanation of morality. How comes it, we must still ask, that man is fitted for the discharge of such a function; whence this splendid human endowment? Kant does not himself connect the self-legislation of man with the divine source of moral government in the universe; but his doctrine of autonomy teaches us that the connection must be no external one. The supreme Head of the moral universe, he who, as holy and not placed under duty, is only sovereign and never subject, must be akin to its other members who occupy the middle state' and are subjects as well as sovereigns, legislators who with difficulty obey the laws of their own making. But what