THE IDEAL OF THE SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE AND THE GOD-IDEAL  
We have seen whence the ideal of a spiritual universe arises. It is unnecessary to prove that the universe is moral. What it is necessary to verify is that a universe exists; for “universe” is an ethical ideal, it is the ethical manifold, or, if we distinguish ethical as concerning relations between man and man, then we may use the term “spiritual” to designate that infinite system of interdependence in which men as ethical units have their place. We begin with the affirmation—Man is an end per se. This wonderful affirmation, which the democracies are darkly and confusedly trying to express in political and social arrangements, constitutes the problem of all problems. It is the great datum of ethics, of which ethical theory must give an account. All other data or problems that have been thrust into the foreground—freedom of the will, responsibility, altruistic self-sacrifice—are secondary, in the sense that they depend for their solution on a right conception of man as end per se. As possessing worth on his own account he is an ethical unit. Only as a member of the infinite spiritual universe does he possess the two-fold attributes implied in worth—inviolability with respect to outsiders and indefeasible, intrinsic preciousness. Therefore I say that around the126 individual, the ethical unit, we build up as a necessary postulate the spiritual universe. Man ethically considered carries with him this infinite environment.
 
Does this universe exist or is it a mere figment? It is the product of the reality-producing functions in their ideal completion. It is the necessary postulate required if the idea of right is to have validity, and the idea of right is required by man in so far as he is an agent and not merely a spectator of life. The ethical manifold, the spiritual universe, exists in so far as there is a right.
 
Have we then reinstated the idea of God as existent? Not the idea of God as an individual. We have on the contrary set aside that idea by affirming that manifoldness cannot be derived from unity, that the positing of plurality is just as much a primary function of the mind as the positing of unity. We have discarded the God-idea as the locus of unity, since the unity subsists in the relation of the units. Strictly speaking, we have replaced the God-idea by that of a universe of spiritual beings interacting in infinite harmony.
 
But at this point I must go back for a moment to Kant, using his ideas once more as a foil to make my own more explicit. Wilhelm von Humboldt said of Kant that some of the things he had destroyed would never be rebuilt, and that some of the things he had built would never be destroyed.
 
For more than a hundred years the impression has prevailed that among the things forever destroyed by Kant are the proofs of the existence of God. He is represented as an intellectual giant whose blows have forever shattered the proofs on which the existence of a127 supersensible reality rested. Kant’s mind was pre?minently scientific. He was the philosopher who made explicit the principles underlying Newtonian science as Aristotle had made explicit the logic underlying the Greek science. His philosophy is essentially agnostic. The use that he continues to make of the God-idea can be dissociated from his system with advantage to the latter.34
 
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But did Kant indeed destroy the idea of a supersensible reality as existent, or are we warranted in undertaking to build anew the supersensible world.35 “Du hast sie zerst?rrt, die sch?ne Welt, In deinem Busen baue sie wieder”—not indeed in the realm of mere feelings, but in the sphere of will. The spell of Kant’s shattering attack still rests upon the intellectual world today. The notion of a supersensible reality, if held at all, is held timidly, apologetically and is apt to be based on subjective emotional need. The wish is more or less admitted to be father to the faith—the will to believe is defiantly asserted in despair of sound foundations. A scientist like Dubois-Reymond enumerates seven world riddles, or mysteries that cannot be explained, and after saying that they cannot be explained, he seems to see that no alternative remains but to take refuge in resignation: “Ignoramus, ignorabimus!”
 
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That “explanation” is not the only avenue to truth, that the referring of effects to their causes is not the highest operation of the reality-producing functions, I have pointed out in a previous chapter. But Kant, as has been said, is supposed to have utterly annihilated the arguments intended to demonstrate the existence of God, and it will clear up the matter at issue if we consider wherein he actually succeeded and wherein he quite failed. As he himself declares, his method is regressive; he does not attempt the progressive method path. He seeks to ascertain whether by going backward along the chain of effects and causes, or of conditions, he can somewhere find God as first cause or as unconditioned. He does not look forward looking to the ideals of the will. He does not enter into the realm of ends, where the necessity of determining action in obedience to some universal plan or scheme of relations might have forced itself on his attention. His approach, like his habit of mind, is scientific. He is not primarily an ethicist. Proceeding in this manner he shows that the notion of a first cause is untenable, and he attacks in particular the ontological argument by which every other argument supplements itself at the point where it breaks down.
 
Did Kant, however, annihilate the Ontological Argument? Yes, in the scholastic form in which it was held. No, in a form, based on the idea of the ethical manifold, in which it can be restated. In the scholastic form it runs:130 “There is such a thing as the idea of a perfect being. Existence is an element of perfection. If the perfect being did not exist it would be less than perfect. But the ens realissimum, the perfect being, is present as an idea in the mind. Therefore it exists.” The disproof of this amounts to the curt statement that what exists in the mind does not necessarily exist outside of it, or, as Kant put it: “The idea of 100 thalers in the head of a man is one thing, lacking no element of conceptual integrity; while the existence of the 100 thalers in the man’s purse is an entirely different matter.” The evidence of existence, in other words, depends on the synthesis of the data of sense as arranged in the space and time manifold in accordance with the categories of the understanding. Existence is temporal and spatial. To prove that God exists we should have to prove that he exists in the world of the senses. Of any other kind of existence we are agnostic. Kant’s disproof of the Ontological Argument thus depends on his agnosticism.
 
But suppose that on ethical grounds we find ourselves compelled to affirm that there is an object which has worth, and that to account for the inviolableness, indispensableness and preciousness of this object we are compelled to give free rein to the reality-producing functions, and to place this object having worth as a member in a manifold not spatial and temporal but infinite: and suppose we say that the existence of this worth-endowed object, of this ethical unit with its compeers, is as certain as the notion of rightness is certain, have we not then without blame widened the conception of existence, and placed the Ontological Argu131ment where Kant’s disproof does not even touch it?36
 
One more important remark is here in place, suggested by Kant’s designation of God as the ideal of reason, and by his designation of our highest nature as the rational nature.
 
Is “rational” equivalent to intellectual? If it be so, then feeling must be classed as irrational, and impulse likewise, since neither feeling nor impulse is subject to logical rules. And then the war will be on between the intellectualists or rationalists and the champions of irrational conceptions of life, since feeling and impulse actually make up the major part of life, and can neither be left out of account nor compressed into intellectualist formulas.37
 
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Plainly, there is a deep misunderstanding between the two parties. An error is involved somewhere. It appears to consist in assuming that objectivity can be supplied only by the intellect, in overlooking the fact that the feelings and still more the volition possess intrinsic controls and norms of their own, that Science, the work of the intellect, and art and ethics, spring from a common root, namely, the reality-producing functions. The manifolds with which each of the three respectively deals are different, the methods of synthesis are different, but the root principle, synthesis of the manifold, is identical in all.
 
To describe our highest nature, therefore, as the rational nature is perilous, since the word rational suggests intellectual. Either we must strain the signification of reason to include feeling and will, which is contrary to common usage, or we should select some other term, such as spiritual, to designate that nature within us which operates in science and art and achieves its highest manifestation in producing the ethical ideal.
 
Finally, if what has been said regarding the ethical manifold holds good, then a genuine philosophy of life can only be reached by the ethical approach to the problems of life. This has never yet been consistently attempted. The approach has been made from the scientific or the logical side, or as in the case of Plato from the ?sthetic, or as in modern times from the biological. Yet the ethical approach is full of promise. A philosophy of physical nature may be feasible without it, a philosophy of art may be possible without it, but not so a philosophy of life. It has not been tried because ethics has lain in the lap of theology, which was itself corrupted by the attempt to apply to ethical problems the inadequate principle of causality in the form of creation theories, while again in recent times, by way133 of reaction against theology, the solution of ethical questions is sought for in the empirical disciplines where a measure at least of objective certainty has rewarded the investigators. Even Kant, who asserted the independence of ethics, actually made it dependent on Newtonian science. The great task now is, strictly to carry out the idea of the independence of ethics, not indeed as if its principles were unrelated to those of science and art, but in the sense of independently investigating the problems peculiar to ethical consciousness. I am well aware that the attempt made in this volume to take the ethical line of approach to a general philosophy of life, is tentative and defective in a hundred ways, nevertheless it is an attempt in a new direction.
 
In the next book I shall take up the practical consequences that follow from the theory here advanced. Having delineated the ethical ideal, and discovered the invaluable fact that there is a structural plan contained in it, we shall see that our actual human duties may be derived by applying this ideal scheme to the quasi-organic groups already existing in human society. There are provocative correspondences to the ethical ideal in the social life of men; otherwise it would be impossible to apply it. There are human groups in which a quasi-correlative membership in a common life already exists. In the case of each of these groups we find some sort of empirical multiplicity which must be studied scientifically, and also an empirical motive which may be utilized in the interest of developing the ethical relation. The family is the first of these groups which offers a footing in the world of experience for the ideal. In the134 family natural affection is the motive; in the vocational group, the desire to express a talent or special gift; in the state, patriotism; in the church, the need felt to integrate all human ideals.
 
Thus the things of earth are to be used as instrumentalities by which we are to become aware of the spiritual reality. Only that the disparateness of the physical world and the ethical universe should ever be kept in the foreground. Every effort to solve the riddle by somehow identifying the two has failed. To account for the existence of a finite world of indefinite extensibility side by side with a universe ex hypothesi infinite is impossible. Instead of seeking to explain let effort go toward utilizing. Let the world be used instrumentally for the purpose of verifying the existence of universe.
 
For the average man, and indeed for all men, the test of the truth of a theory is in the practice to which it leads. Abstract metaphysical arguments appeal only to a few, and even for them the formula in its abstract guise is unconvincing. Look at the mathematical figure, and see whether the axioms hold good. Look at the sequent phenomena and see whether the so-called law of nature is exemplified. And so with respect to conduct: look at the ways of human behavior traced out in accordance with the plan of the ethical manifold, and see whether such behavior wins the approval of the spiritual nature implicit within you.38
 
NOTE I
 
There are various points at which the system sketched in the text deviates from current opinion, but in regard to the underlying proposition the reader’s particular attention is called to the remarks on the “prejudice of causality” and to the statement that verification is exemplification.
 
How can ethical truth be verified? How can we be sure that ethical ideals are more than fine wishes, expressing subjective aspiration, but having no counterpart in the ultimate constitution of things? This is the dark doubt that haunts the minds of ethical writers, as well as of the average man. We ask to have the things we believe in, the objects of our supreme aspiration, verified. How can they be verified?
 
I think that we shall see light in this matter once we have grasped the thought that verification, both in science and in ethics, is nothing more than exemplification. In the case of causality, in science, verification does not consist in mere recurrence. For if we find, even by a single carefully guarded experiment, that a given phenomenon A is the true antecedent of B, then we take leave to predict that B will always follow A, without regard to the repetition of the sequence in our 136experience.39 Indeed, no amount of repetition would justify prediction. The problem in the case of causality is to determine the true antecedent and the true consequent. For at any moment there are innumerable phenomena that might possibly be antecedents of B. How obtain certainty that A is the causal antecedent? By the synthetic process. We assume a unity, say energy. We assume that there are differenti?, say a certain mathematically determined quantum of mechanical energy in A, a............