pated before the coming of the great Judge like mist before the morning sun. And until fortunes are built up and administered in this way, we may be sure that economic disturbances will continue to mark the progress of that transformation which is being brought about by the fact of our rapidly increasing wealth.

LANCASTER, Pa.

II.

ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MORALS.

BY PROFESSOR RICHARD C. SCHIEDT, PH.D.

The problem assigned to me is primarily an inquiry into the source rather than the course of human action. It implies a proper understanding of the nature and constitution of man. For more than 2,500 years philosophers have speculated on this subject, during the last fifty years they have made experimental tests. The respective schools may be roughly classified as the empirical and the intuitive. Both agree as to the moral nature of particular actions, they widely differ in their interpretation of the source of authority in the universally acknowledged categorical imperative of the "thou shalt" and "thou shalt not." From the Greeks to Darwin and Spencer they all recognize a material and immaterial side in the constitution of man-commonly called body and soulbut as to the causal relation of the two and the consequent choice of the determining factor there exists a multitude of opinions. With the dualistic school, chief of which is Descartes, body and soul are toto genere different, each subject to its own laws and of different origin; the psychic factors are the only source of psychic activity, the somatic are antagonistic. However, our daily experience disproves these conclusions. The materialists, represented by the Ionic school, by Empedocles and Democritos, by the Stoics and the Epicureans, by Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Locke and Hume, by the French Encyclopedists, the German atheists, by Spencer, Huxley and Haeckel, and a host of modern physiologists, deny that there is any distinction between body and soul, between noumena and phenomena, with them the material is the only real and the immaterial is non-existence. Thought is to them only a mode of motion, consciousness a secretion

of the brain as bile is of the liver, their extremists go so far as to denounce the ideas of God, freedom and immortality as mere chimæras, mere products of the imagination. However, as far as I can see, the materialists have merely proved that the soul needs the brain for its operation just as the artist needs his instruments to express his ideas, nothing more. The spiritualistic school on the other hand, represented by the greatest of the world's philosophers from Anaxagoras to Socrates and Plato, from Aristotle to Bishop Berkley, Fichte and Schopenhauer, hold that the world of sensual phenomena is not the world of true existence, that all that which we smell, taste, see, hear and feel does in reality not exist, that the essence of all things is immaterial; only the world of spirit is real, all else is only the creation of thinking spirit or mind. Their extremists like Bishop Berkley hold that spirit is the only essence in the world, and body and soul are absolutely one; others modify this idea, as, e. g., our own Dr. Rauch who says: "It would be wrong to say that man consists of two essentially different substances, of earth and the soul; he is soul only and cannot be anything else. This soul, however, unfolds itself externally in the life of the body and internally in the life of the mind. Twofold in its development it is one in origin." This sounds plausible enough, but the spiritualists have never proved how the soul influences and controls the body. Spiritualism is, therefore, a pure hypothesis such as animism, or vitalism or mesmeric dynamism. Upon the basis of their hypothesis they claim that mind or spirit is endowed with perfect freedom. But discovering that even the strongest will is fettered by the limitations of the body, they assert, that since body is only a manifestation of spirit, such impediments are only self-limitation of spirit and as such not in conflict with absolute freedom. This, however, is merely a bold assertion. Psychologically speaking we are certainly limited in our actions by the conditions of our environment, ethically speaking we are certainly free and unhampered by external conditions to carry out the behests

of the categorical imperative. Kant, therefore, makes the distinction between the heteronomy and the autonomy of the will and I might state at the outset that I adhere to the same principles.

The fault I have to find with spiritualism is, that it does not furnish us any definite explanation as to the actual relation between body and soul. How a will act arises in the soul and how it causes a motion in our bodily organism we are not told, in fact it completely denies anything like a physical basis of morals, with Fichte it is the ego, with Schopenhauer the will which are the controlling factors.

There is still another school of thinkers who have tried to solve this perplexing question, the school of parallelism. While the dualists assume that body and soul are two separate and distinct entities the parallelists postulate a highest absolute being which manifests itself in two forms of body and soul.

A divergence of the two is excluded since the same being manifests itself now as the one, now as the other; they rather run parallel in their motions, but the two are one in God, finding in Him their causal nexus of parallel motions, resulting on the one hand in abstract creations, on the other in a concrete world. Body and soul being identical in the absolute, a special effort to account for processes of transformation or miraculous intervention becomes superfluous. However as the other tendencies so is parallelism a purely metaphysical speculation. If we test it by actual examples it is found wanting. The external appearance of a man often deceives us as to his psychic condition, and physical pleasures run contrary to moral demands. Parallelism would be impossible. Furthermore actual experiment disproves such parallelism. According to the psychophysical law of Weber-Fechner sensations increase in arithmetical progression while the stimuli increase in geometric progression, where then is the identity between increase of stimulus and increase of sensation? Moreover a

multitude of motions occur in our body which never reach consciousness, such as metabolism, circulation, etc. Do they have a psychic correlative? True there are unconscious intuitive processes in our soul but do they entirely cross the threshold of consciousness? Do the processes of vegetative metabolism ever rise into full consciousness?

His

Spinoza is the chief representative of this school. premises are, however, found already in the Stoic's teaching and later on further elaborated in Giordano Bruno. Infinite substance is the basis of all things whether we call it God or nature. It manifests itself in various ways. According to Spinoza's doctrine of the attributes his deity possesses a multitude of them but only two are accessible to man-thinking and expansion. These attributes are the real contents of the deity. God is res cogitans and res extensa. While Descartes assumed infinite substance together with two entirely independent finite substances, spirit and matter with the attributes of thinking and extension, Spinoza postulates that thinking and expansion are two completely separate spheres which exist in the deity independently. In order to bring about a causal nexus between the two he introduces the idea of the modus which is with him a form within a definite attribute, e. g., the human body is a modus within the attribute of extension, the human soul a modus within the attribute of thinking. Since now the attributes of thinking and extension are united in one divine substance and since the nature of the deity is the same in all modi, therefore, all these modi which are contained in the divine attributes of extension and those contained in the divine attribute of thinking as necessary results must in their motions be parallel. The causal nexus between body and soul is here established through the interdependence of the modi within the attributes. The perfection of the soul then must correspond to that of the body and vice versa. There are, however, many difficulties in the way, e. g., for the presentation of the soul as the idea of the human