time: the refreshing river 



too neo-Platonic, idealistic, pietistic and other-worldly. In my anxiety 

 to see the forms of human experience in sharpest antithesis to one 

 another, I almost welcomed characteristics which added to their 

 irreconcilability. I was determined to be a "divider," and if indeed 

 the work of previous "uniters" was insufficiently well-founded, this 

 was no mistake. "Dividing" and "uniting" may be looked upon as 

 dialectical opposites, like continuity and discontinuity, which run 

 through the whole history of philosophical and scientific thought, 

 imperfect unions being always doomed to destruction by later 

 "dividing" critics. 



But much the most significant thing about my point of view at 

 that time, as I remember it, was that I was always uncomfortable 

 about the position of ethics. It was the one department of thought 

 which I could never allot to one or other of the forms of experience. 

 It seemed sometimes to belong to religion, but yet it was obviously 

 profoundly affected by science, and in some situations in time and 

 space, such as early Chinese Confucianism, it existed without any 

 connections with supernatural ism. Nor was it remote from aesthetic 

 experience, since good actions had something beautiful about them; 

 nor could it be considered apart from history, since systems of ethics 

 had changed with changing social conditions. 



The explanation of this difficulty was at hand, however. 



The Breaking in of Ethics and Politics. 



During the past twenty years, the one form of experience which 

 in SB and GA was never taken into account,^ came and forced itself 

 more and more upon my attention, namely politics. Ethics and politics 

 both belong to the realm of man's social life, and my fundamental 

 limitation had been to envisage the experiencing human being as a 

 solitary unit, subject to the diverse forms of experience which I had 

 been classifying. Ethics are the rules whereby men may live together 

 in society with the utmost harmony and the best opportunities for 

 the development of their talents in the common good. Politics are 

 nothing but the attempt to objectify the most advanced ethics in the 

 structure of society, to enmesh the ideal ethical relations in the real 

 world. Hence the class struggles in every age since the origin of 

 private property, which, though at many stages a fundamentally pro- 

 gressive force, at other stages radically hinders the attainment of the 

 next step in social relations. Now so far as my thinking was concerned, 



^ There were indications of it in GA, however, cf. p. 43. 



10 



