3. (b) Modern: (a) Christian asceticism.—The fundamental idea of Christianity is the idea of the divine righteousness, with its absolute claim upon the life of man. This idea was the inheritance of Christianity from the Hebrews, but it was reasserted with a new emphasis and a new rigour: "except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." It is a righteousness not of external act or observance, but of the inner man, a righteousness of heart and will. And though the Founder of Christianity did not, by word or life, inculcate an ascetic ideal, but gave his ungrudging sanction to all the natural joys of life, his uncompromising attitude towards unrighteousness meant inevitably, for himself and for his disciples, suffering, self-sacrifice, and death. The essential spirit of the Christian life is the spirit of the cross. It is out of the death of the natural man that the

spiritual life is born. Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, that leadeth unto life." The way of the Christian life is the way of the Master, the way of utter self-sacrifice: "he that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life shall find it." The natural life of sensibility is not in itself evil, but it must be perfectly mastered and possessed by the rational spirit. If it offends the spirit's life—and it may offend at any point -it must be denied. "If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is better for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell." So exacting is the Christian ideal of righteousness.

We know how this moral rigour of Christianity was developed by its disciples into an asceticism of life, in which the Stoic' apathy' was reproduced and given a new ethical significance. Not to save himself from the attacks

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of a capricious and often evil fate, but to save the spirit's life from the snares of the tempting flesh, is man called upon to eradicate all desire. For the flesh, as such, is antagonistic to the spirit, and matter is essentially evil. The thought of this ethical dualism-this home-sickness of the soul for the ideal world whence it had fallen into this lower life of sense and time- -came to the Christian Church, as it had come to the Stoics, from Plato. To Plato all education had been a process of purification, a gradual recovery of what at birth man lost, an ever more perfect ' reminiscence' of the upper world. There is man's true home; not here, in the cave of sensibility, the soul's sad prison-house. If this thought never took hold of the Greeks themselves, we know how potent it was with the Neo-platonists and with the medieval saints and mystics. The medieval world was a world of thought and aspiration, of 'divine discontent' with the actual, an eternal world in which no room was found for the interests of time, a world of contemplation rather than of activity. Of this spirit the characteristic product was Monasticism, with its effort to detach the spirit from the flesh, its separation from the world, and its vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. The monk dies as an individual with ends of his own, as a man and a citizen, and becomes the devotee of the universal and divine end, as he conceives it all secular' interests are lost in the 'religious.' Nor did Christian asceticism pass away with the Middle Ages. It survives not only in contemporary Catholicism, but, to a large extent, in the life of Protestantism as well. Christianity is still apt to be other-worldly,' to regard this life as merely a pilgrimage, and a preparation for that better life which will begin with the separation of the spirit from the body of its humiliation, to regard time as but 'the lackey to eternity,' to think that here we have only the preface, there the volume of our life, here the prelude, there the music. Accounting his citizenship to be in the heavenly and eternal world, and preoccupied

with its affairs, the Christian saint is apt to sit loose to the things of time, and to cultivate an aloofness and apathy of spirit no less real than that of Stoic sage or mediæval monk.

The great

4. (B) Kantian transcendentalism. modern representative, in ethical thought, of the extreme or ascetic form of Rationalism is Kant, the author of one of the most impressive moral idealisms of all time. For Kant the good-the only thing absolute and altogether good-is the good will. And the good will is, for him, the rational will, the will obedient to the law of the universal reason. It is the prerogative of a rational being to be self-legislative. The animal life is one of heteronomy; the course of its activity is dictated by external stimuli. And if man had been a merely sentient being, and pleasure his end, nature would have managed his life for him as she manages the animal's, by providing him with the necessary instincts. The peculiarity of man's life is that it belongs to two spheres. As a sensible being, man is a member of the animal sphere, whose law is pleasure; as a rational being, he enacts upon himself the higher law of reason which takes no account of sensibility. Hence arises for him the categorical imperative of duty-the 'thou shalt' of the rational being to the irrational or sentient. As a rational being, man demands of himself a life which shall be reason's own creation, whose spring shall be found in pure reverence for the law of his rational nature. Inclination and desire are necessarily subjective and particular; and, in so far as they enter, they detract from the ethical value of the action. Nor do consequences come within the province of morality; the goodness is determined solely by the inner rational form of the act. The categorical quality of the imperative of morality is founded on the absolute worth of that nature whose law it is. A rational being is, as such, an end-in-himself, and may not regard

himself as a means to any other end. He must act always in one way-namely, so as to fulfil his rational nature; he may never use his reason as a means by which to compass non-rational ends. The law of his life. is: "s So act as to regard humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of another, always as an end, never as a means."

The moral law thus becomes for Kant the gateway of the noumenal life. As subject to its categorical imperative, man is a member of the intelligible or supersensible world the world of pure reason. From that higher vantage-ground, he sees the entire empirical life disappear, as the mere shadow or husk of moral reality. As moral, he lives and moves and has his being in that noumenal world from which, as intellectual, he is for ever shut out. As he listens to the voice of duty, and concedes the absolute and uncompromising severity of its claim upon his life, he feels that he is greater than he knows,' and welcomes it as the business of his life to appropriate his birthright, and to constitute himself indeed, what in idea he is from the first, a member and a citizen of the intelligible world. There too he finds the goodly fellowship of universal intelligence, and becomes at once subject and sovereign in the kingdom of pure reason.

5. Criticism of extreme Rationalism, and transition to moderate.-Such are the chief forms of Rationalism, in its extreme type, and it is not difficult to see how the fundamental defects of such a view of life necessitated the transition to the more moderate form of the theory.

(1) The view rests upon an absolute psychological dualism of reason and sensibility, of the rational and the irrational. Because reason differentiates man from the animal, and his life must therefore be a rational life, it is inferred that all the animal sensibility must be

eliminated. The result is an intellectualising of the moral life, the identification of goodness with wisdom, of virtue with knowledge, of duty with rational consistency, of practical activity with philosophic contemplation. But this passionless life of reason is not the life of man as we know him. We cannot summarily dismiss the entire life of sensibility as irrational. Without sensibility there is no activity; the moral life, as such, implies feeling.

(2) If we dismiss feeling, we lose the entire material of morality, and what is left is only its empty form. It is notorious that the Kantian ethics are purely formal, giving us the sine qua non of the good life, but not the very face and lineaments of goodness itself. By identifying will with practical reason, and by demanding that the motive of all activity shall be found within reason, it provides at most the mere form of will,—a ́ will that wills itself,' a logical intellect rather than a good will. The ideal life of Plato and Aristotle is confessedly a purely intellectual or speculative life. But the flesh and blood of moral reality come from sensibility. has been truly said that the movement of the real world is not a ghostly ballet of bloodless categories;' no more is the movement of human life. In its dance, reason and sensibility must be partners, even though they often quarrel; nay, their true destiny is a wedded life, in which no permanent divorce is possible. That feeling is simply irrational, and incapable of becoming an element in the life of a rational being, is sheer mysticism; and mysticism in ethics is no less false than mysticism in metaphysics. To deny the reality of any element of the real world, and to refuse to deal with it, -that is the essence of mysticism. The very problem of the moralist is set for him by the existence of this dualism of reason and sensibility in human nature, and of this alternative possibility, in human life, of guidance by feeling or guidance by reason. To eliminate or to