More recently a brilliant French writer, who has attempted to establish a system of “morality without obligation or sanction,” has suggested that the place of the categorical law of duty may be taken by a speculative hypothesis, and that hope may serve where there is no ground for belief.  “The speculative hypothesis is a risk taken in the sphere of thought; action in accordance with this hypothesis is a risk taken in the sphere of will; and that being is higher who will undertake and risk the more whether in thought or action."[1] Thus, “for example, if I would perform an act of charity pure and simple, and wish to justify this act rationally, I must imagine an eternal Charity at the ground of things and of myself, I must objectify the sentiment which leads to my action; and here the moral agent plays the same role as the artist....  In every human action there is an element of error, of illusion”:  and it is conjectured that this element increases as the action rises above the commonplace:  “the most loving hearts are the most often deceived, in the highest geniuses the greatest incoherences are often found."[2]

[Footnote 1:  Guyau, Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction (1885) p. 250.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., pp. 226, 227.]

This solution can hardly be regarded as other than a counsel of despair.  Its ethical value is merely apparent.  What is of importance for ethics is not so much the presence of some ideal:  it is the kind of ideal that matters.  It is possible to have an ideal of selfishness as well as an ideal of love, a sensual ideal as well as a spiritual.  Nietzsche’s over-man is an ideal; the Mohammedan paradise is an ideal; and conduct can be modelled on them.  But it is not enough to have system in conduct, irrespective of the worth of the ideal which determines the system.  Some criterion is needed for deciding between competing ideals.  As long as they are looked upon as mere illusions, as expressions of doubt, or as a hazard staked on the unknowable, caprice takes the place of law; where all is equally uncertain there is no security for the worth of the ideal itself.

Unsatisfactory as they are in this form, the opinions referred to are echoes of a pregnant doctrine of Kant’s—­the doctrine that the moral consciousness brings us into closer touch with reality than the merely theoretical reason can reach.  Various lines of recent thought may be said to have been suggested by this view.  Almost every idealist metaphysician has tended to look upon thought itself as constituting the inmost reality of the universe which it conceives or understands; and Kant’s doctrine may make us pause and ask whether this tendency is not simply an assumption without warrant.

Again, the psychological analysis of knowledge has brought out the fact of its constant dependence upon practical interests.  It is the need to perform or attain something, which is the motive that leads to the understanding of things; and the understanding of things with which alone we are satisfied is commonly that which helps us so to describe our experience as to be able to control some practical result.  ‘Knowledge is power’; and not only so, but in its early stages and in most of its later developments, knowledge is for power:  it is for purposes of his own that man becomes the ‘interpreter of nature.’