396 £SSAVS LV PHILOSOPHY 



materialism, ethics can never, properly speaking, be morals. 

 If it escapes fatalism of the hardest sort, with all the con- 

 sequent hopelessness for most, it cannot avoid hedonism, 

 nor, in the logical end, an egoistic and utterly transient and 

 trivial hedonism. 



We have to confine ourselves, then, in any hope of finding 

 conditions adequate for morality — conditions adequate, 

 that is, for the life of serious duty — to the first and second 

 of our groups. But from the second, — the systems of 

 efficient causation construed in terms of monism and imma- 

 nence, — the self-determining individual is necessarily can- 

 celled. All the particular beings involved in the being of 

 the monistic Whole are but modes or expressions of the 

 sole self-activity of the Whole ; they have no activity really 

 their own, but only a derivative operation, determined by 

 the One. This is either openly confessed by the supporters 

 of these systems, or, if they attempt to evade it, they are 

 compelled to end in more or less concealed confessions of 

 it, despite all their efforts. If anybody doubts this, let him 

 attentively read Hegel on this question, or T. H. Green, the 

 brothers Caird, and Professor Royce.^ 



The first group of systems, the dualistic (or literal) crea- 

 tionisms, have, to first impression, a certain appearance of 

 providing for the possibility of freedom, and therefore of a 

 genuine morality. For it seems nominally possible that a 

 Creator by fiat might yet say : "Be, thou ! — a nature with 

 power to perceive and to judge, and with will to choose, 

 unpredestined ; I create thee rational, and leave thee 

 untrammelled." But not to mention the complete contra- 

 diction of this which the usual theologies and other schemes 

 of predestination introduce, from the need of organising the 



^ Let the interested reader consult, particularly, Professor Royce's 

 " Supplementary Essay " in the volume entitled The Co7iception of God 

 (New York : The Macmillan Co., 1S97), in tlie chapter where he 

 undertakes to deal with the question of the freedom of the individual. 



