408 ETHICS 



I will observe an eclipse of the moon, but I cannot will the occurrence 

 of this eclipse of the moon, or riot will it. 



If we reduce the difficulty to the simplest formula, it would be as 

 follows: the theory of evolution did not distinguish between two 

 completely different kinds of attitudes on the part of human mental 

 activity; between the knowledge of the necessity of what exists and 

 its judgment by standards of value. But it is precisely with the 

 latter that ethics has to do. It is, like logic and aesthetics, a science 

 of values; the interest in the question how something has come to be, 

 is quite different from the interest in determining its value. Every- 

 thing has come to be, the valueless as well as the valued, with the 

 same necessity; that is a self-evident presupposition of all explana- 

 tory science. The bungling drawing of a school-boy and the Sistine 

 Madonna, the hallucinations of a lunatic and the thought of a 

 Herbert Spencer, a demonic crime and a deed of the purest ethical 

 fulfillment of duty, are, in the same sense, necessary; but with the 

 knowledge of this necessity we have not come a single step nearer 

 to the task of their valuation. 



The difference between these two kinds of attitudes has perhaps 

 never been more clearly sketched than in Fichte's book On the 

 Calling of Man. If we assume that I have a fully adequate scientific 

 knowledge of the course of nature, I might discern that this grain 

 of sand which the storm has set in motion could not drift a hair's 

 breadth farther, unless the whole previous course of nature had been 

 quite different; what then would be gained for my own moral action? 

 The answer must be: Nothing. More than that, if this point of view 

 were the only possible for man, then this action would have no 

 longer, as a moral action, any significance, and could have none; 

 since as a part of the world event alike in value to all other parts it 

 would remain like in value, and it would be meaningless to select and 

 emphasize out of this continuum of facts and environments, alike in 

 value, single elements as especially valuable and significant. The 

 man who could not resign himself to this knowledge, who could 

 not be satisfied to continue, in cool content, at the point of view of 

 the silent contemplation of causes, must fall into conflicts similar 

 to those which Carlyle so vividly described in Sartor Resartus. We 

 must then, in order to an understanding for this new problem, 

 provisionally disregard, above all else, whatever the theory of evo- 

 lution has accomplished by way of scientific explanation, and reserve 

 for a later investigation the ethical valuation of this sequence of 

 development. The question which is now to occupy us is directed, 

 first of all, to the subject of our moral valuation. What do we call 

 good or bad? 



This is the main question of all normative ethics in general, and its 

 answer by Kant will always remain a brilliant feat in this field. He 



