OP THE GOOD. 177 



represent and realise than to the ultimate source and 

 form of morality : the content, the realisable result of 

 morality, is to him more interesting than the form. 

 Thus he cultivates a chapter in Ethics which had been 

 overlooked or forgotten, which in Kant's ethics notably 

 had been treated as an appendix and of secondary 

 consideration, the chapter of moral goods or of The 

 Good, the summum bonum of ancient philosophers. 

 This permits him to give much more attention, and to do 

 much more justice, to the various creations and products 

 of culture and civilisation, such as the Family, Society, 

 the State, the Church, Science, Art, and the historical 

 Keligions. Many of the existing institutions, of the 

 vehicles of culture, morality, and refinement, he looks 

 upon as possessed of an individual character, as person- 

 alities. His idea of personality and individuality 

 permits him to appreciate individual differences. In no 

 one individual, in no one institution, can the whole 

 essence and meaning of the absolute be realised, only in 

 many individuals and individual creations and in their 

 historical succession. The absolute is spread out, is 

 realised in space and time. And here he takes up and 

 appreciates, more completely than some of his fore- 

 runners, the idea of progress, the infinite process of 

 realisation in history. This view leads him to a special 

 understanding of positive religion as the complement, 

 the fulfilment of abstract or philosophical religion. 



Philosophical religion, the reasoned creed which the 

 philosophy of his age was trying to find and establish, 

 remained too abstract. Something more concrete was 

 wanted for the practical religious teacher, something 



VOL. IV. M 



