256 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



ethics of voluntarism unite with the ethics of naturalism 

 as represented notably by the later speculations and 

 labours of Herbert Spencer and his disciples. 



Neither is the opposite or the critical school in Ger- 

 many content with founding Ethics on purely psycho- 

 logical data, on the intuitive facts of consciousness such 

 as the feeling of duty and the moral conscience. Though 

 this school holds firmly to the undeniable existence of 

 these data, holding sometimes with Kant that they form 

 a sufficient basis for the construction and maintenance 

 of practical morality, it nevertheless desires to utilise 

 these facts for the construction of a reasoned Creed or 

 theory of the general Connection of Things, which should 

 justify the conviction familiar to common-sense and 

 confirmed by exponents of almost every school of thought, 

 that the moral Ideal or the Good is not only the greatest 

 concern of man and mankind, but that it also somehow 

 reveals to us the nature of the truly Eeal, the spiritual 

 Power which underlies and sustains everything. The 

 ethics of the critical school thus lead to a religious con- 

 ception ; they did so with Kant and with most of his 

 followers, though in very varied forms and versions.-^ 



^ It may be well here to refer 

 to the important work of Charles 

 Renouvier in France, notably to 

 his ' Science de la Morale ' (2 vols., 

 1869), which is iu the main a 

 development of Kantian ideas 

 attempting to lead out of the pure 

 formalism of Kant's individualistic 

 ethics to a practical system of 

 morality by insisting on the fact 

 that the moral idea is only possible 

 in a community of free agents, i.e., 

 in human society. In (juite recent 

 times, since the secularisation of 

 public instruction and the founda- 



tion of the Scales la'iques, the 

 teaching of morals has become a 

 difficult problem ; teachers in the 

 primary and notably in the higher 

 normal schools are face to face 

 with the question : on what founda- 

 tion moral teaching is to be placed, 

 recourse to religious sanctions being 

 discarded, or even prohibited ? 

 There remain then, as it seems, 

 two distinct lines of thought, the 

 one pointing to historical develop- 

 ment of human culture in the 

 spirit of Comte enlivened by the 

 doctrine of evolution : the law of 



