xvi SYSTEMATIC THOUGHT 391 



if the method is true to itself, can be left out that is per- 

 manently necessary or desirable in the formation of human 

 character. Hence the ethical religion claims the privilege 

 of concentrating, like other religions, all life and all its 

 powers on a single aim, but it concentrates without narrow- 

 ing. Its ideal is to bring to their highest pitch all the 

 faculties of man so far as they are capable of harmonious 

 development. Its enemy is everything that conflicts with 

 such harmony, and of this it finds much in the established 

 order, and even in the recognised moral and religious 

 teaching of the best ordered societies. It has therefore 

 constantly to go back from the recognised ideal to its own 

 deeper ideal. Its work is constantly to revise social rela- 

 tions and moral values in accordance with the realities of 

 human nature and social life. In this formula we arrive 

 by another road at the point reached when discussing the 

 goal of scientific thought. We saw then that the develop- 

 ment of science and philosophy pointed to the ideal of a 

 completed system in which the results of race experience 

 should be so far co-ordinated as to make possible a just 

 understanding of the true lines of race-development. We 

 saw that this ideal postulated a certain development of 

 the ethical consciousness 3 since it is for this consciousness 

 that the race becomes a unity, while even to apprehend, 

 and, much more, to translate it into a practical correlation 

 of conduct and ideal, an ethical principle was needed as the 

 underlying motive. We have now sketched the course of 

 ethical development so far as to show that it leads us to 

 the same result, that the highest ethical consciousness 

 postulates an understanding of the possibilities of race 

 development, and consists in the effort to remodel social, 

 moral, and religious life in accordance therewith. As in- 

 theoretical, so in practical science, the higher development 

 consists in a double process. Like philosophy, it is a com- 

 pletion of the co-ordination of conduct which we find in all 

 moral ideas by the formation of a single comprehensive 

 system. Like philosophy, it proceeds by tracing existing 

 conceptions back to underlying principles, finding in such 

 principles a keystone of the arch. 



The parallel between ethical development and the general 



