PROBLEMS OF ETHICS 411 



ceases in the scholar for whom there are no more problems in his 

 science. From this point of view the result is necessary that the 

 category of duties, to speak with Hegel, is absolutely infinite; and 

 in this perhaps lies the considerable difference between modern and 

 ancient ethics. For ancient ethics the ideal of the wise man was 

 a distinctly finitely determined amount. However difficult it might 

 be to fulfill the conditions for it, it could still be fulfilled in a human 

 life; and a further advance beyond this fulfilled ideal would have 

 been to the Greeks an absurdity: it is the "nothing too much" 

 transferred to the ethical point of view. It is otherwise in modern 

 ethics, and with this is connected the change in that the concept of 

 the infinite has become a concept of value. It is as Carlyle says: 

 " Fulfill the next duty which presents itself to thee, and when thou 

 hast fulfilled it, wait for ten, twenty, a hundred to be fulfilled." But 

 we recognize the degree of ethical development which a man has 

 attained by noting that it is no longer duty to him. 



If the limits of the moral valuation have been much restricted 

 by the introduction of the concept of unmoral actions, it has been 

 extended in the other direction by the insight that now every action 

 which happens in fulfillment of a command of duty is to be valued 

 as the result of a moral disposition. We come thus to the problem 

 which, since the time of the ancient sophists, has not ceased to occupy 

 minds, and which may most simply be termed the anthropological 

 problem. What in the world is there that is not by individuals and 

 by people deemed to be moral! With what strange contents the 

 formal " Thou shalt " of morality is filled ! In face of these contradic- 

 tions, is there any sense at all in speaking of ethical commands? All 

 skeptical attacks upon ethics find in such considerations their strong- 

 est support; and here again the answer is easy when we reflect upon 

 the analogy with science, art, and religion. Aristotle and Democritus, 

 Hegel and Hobbes, have taught very differently, and yet all have been 

 busy with science. Raphael and Menzel are surely to be valued as 

 artists; Mahomet and Buddha were both religious geniuses of the first 

 magnitude. Why should it be different in the field of ethics? What 

 other men have held to be moral, how they have acted, this can be 

 valuable to me, in order for me to become clear with regard to my 

 own moral determination, just as the artist sees the works of other 

 masters, just as the scientific man must know the theorems of others. 

 But all this cannot be the standard for the formation of my own life. 

 I am, once for all, placed in this world, to be active there; I am 

 responsible to myself for what I wish to accomplish with this life. 

 And so it can, it is true, be an encouragement to me that other men 

 have felt in themselves the same motive to moral activity; I can 

 give them my hand as striving for the same with me through the 

 separating centuries and across the estranging seas. But their way 



