io6 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



The faculty is more than part and parcel of myself ; it is the 

 communion of God's life and guiding love entering and 

 abiding with an apprehensive capacity in myself." "The 

 real, eternal objective will of God seems to me to construe 

 very faithfully the sense of authority attaching to our moral 

 nature : they are in us, but not of us ; not ours, but God's." 



We have now found the key to Dr. Martineau's 

 classification of ethical theories. It is really a 

 dichotomous division based on the recognition or 

 non-recognition of the truth of personality and 

 the fundamental doctrine of obligation. In the 

 ancient world " the notion of personality was held 

 very indistinctly and with great fluctuation," while, 

 with the exception of Bishop Butler and some 

 writers of the Scottish school, " it is difficult to 

 find any class of recent moralists who have 

 declined to betray their science to the physiologist 

 on the one hand, or the ontologist on the other." 

 Whether personality and freedom are merged in 

 metaphysic, immanental or transcendental, or in 

 physiology, as with Comte and Spencer, or are 

 lost in the false psychology of the hedonist or 

 rational or aesthetic schools, makes little difference. 

 They are only subdivisions of the negative arm of 

 the dichotomy. 



But those who, like Dr. Martineau, allow the 

 moral consciousness to speak for itself, must make 

 the transition, as he does, from morals to meta- 

 physics and theology, must ask, What metaphysic 

 'will furnish an adequate basis and justification for 



