OF THE SPIRIT. 275 



logical studies of Fechner and Wundt on the other. 

 What this school has to say regarding religious life 

 and phenomena is introduced through the conception 

 of value. The fundamental psychological fact upon 

 which ethical and sesthetical judgments depend is the 

 value which the contemplating mind attaches to certain 

 things and processes of nature, and still more emphatic- 

 ally to certain forms of human conduct. This con- 

 ception admits of a spiritual as well as a naturalistic 

 interpretation. It can be enlarged into the conception 

 of a world of values or worths, of things which are 

 valuable in themselves and deserve to exist as such. 

 They may be conceived either — in the spirit of Plato — 

 as ideals, as things of supreme worth which human 

 beings have to accept as standards of judgment and 

 aims of conduct, or, they may consist merely in norms 

 or rules of conduct to be consciously or unconsciously 

 abstracted out of the natural development of the human 

 race and human society, in the same way as what we 

 call laws of nature are gained by reflection and abstraction 

 from the region of observed phenomena. 



The former, the ideal or spiritual, view was in recent 

 times distinctly proclaimed by Lotze, and has from him 

 been introduced through Albrecht Eitschl into theological 

 literature. The latter, or naturalistic interpretation of 

 the ideas of value, forms a characteristic side of 

 Positivism, and still more so of that recent school 

 of ethics which has adopted the modern canons of 

 development as established by the theories of descent 

 and the philosophy of evolution. 



We must now trace somewhat more in detail the 



