OUK MONISTIC ETHICS. 357 



Modern anthropology has ruthlessly dissipated that 

 pretty dream ; it has shown that conceptions of duty 

 differ even more among uncivilized than among civi- 

 lized nations. All the actions and customs which we 

 regard as sins or loathsome crimes (theft, fraud, murder, 

 adultery, etc.) are considered by other nations in certain 

 circumstances to be virtues, or even sacred duties. 



Although the obvious contradiction of the two 

 forms of reason in Kant's teaching, the fundamental 

 antagonism of pure and practical reason, was recog- 

 nized and attacked at the very beginning of the 

 century, it is still pretty widely accepted. The 

 modern school of neo-Kantians urges a " return to 

 Kant" so pressingly precisely on account of this 

 agreeable dualism ; the Church militant zealously 

 supports it because it fits in admirably with its own 

 mystic faith. But it met with an effective reverse at 

 the hands of modern science in the second half of the 

 nineteenth century, which entirely demolished the 

 theses of the system of practical reason. Monistic 

 cosmology proved, on the basis of the law of substance, 

 that there is no personal God ; comparative and 

 genetic psychology showed that there cannot be an 

 immortal soul ; and monistic physiology proved the 

 futility of the assumption of " free will." Finally, 

 the science of evolution made it clear that the same 

 eternal iron laws that rule in the inorganic world are 

 valid, too, in the organic and moral world. 



But modern science gives not only a negative 

 support to practical philosophy and ethics in 

 demolishing the Kantian dualism, but it renders 

 the positive service of substituting for it the new 

 structure of ethical monism. It shows that the feeling 

 of duty does not rest on an illusory " categorical 



