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The more strictly ethical views of PLOTINUS, the chief representative of the school, are found mainly in the first of the six Enneads into which Porphyry collected his master's essays. But as they presuppose the cosmological and psychological doctrines, their place in the works, as now arranged, is to be regarded as arbitrary.
As I long ago pointed out, these two great questions are not two separate "world-riddles." The neurological problem of consciousness is only a special case of the all comprehending cosmological problem, the question of substance. "If we understood the nature of matter and energy, we should also understand how the substance underlying them can under certain conditions feel, desire, and think."
Impelled towards the hypothesis of the transmutation of species, partly by his general cosmological and geological views; partly by the conception of a graduated, though irregularly branching, scale of being, which had arisen out of his profound study of plants and of the lower forms of animal life, Lamarck, whose general line of thought often closely resembles that of De Maillet, made a great advance upon the crude and merely speculative manner in which that writer deals with the question of the origin of living beings, by endeavouring to find physical causes competent to effect that change of one species into another, which De Maillet had only supposed to occur.
Since religion is a belief concerning the overruling control of human interests, it involves on the one hand a summing up of these interests, a conception of what the believer has at stake, in short, an ethical judgment; and on the other hand, an interpretation of the environment at large, in other words, a cosmological judgment.
In proportion as the traditions of the past become dimmed, the more easily do they lend themselves to a blending with popular myths regarding the phenomena of nature. To this material popularly produced, a literary shape would be given through the same medium that remodeled the popular cosmological speculations.
There can be no religion with reservations, fearful of increasing light. No man can do the work of religion without an open and candid mind as well as an indomitable purpose. I can not here elaborate the evidence upon which moral idealism is grounded; but it might be broadly classified as ethical, cosmological, and historical.
This regress cannot, therefore, be called a regressus in indefinitum, as happened in the case of the preceding cosmological idea, the regress in which proceeded from the conditioned to the conditions not given contemporaneously and along with it, but discoverable only through the empirical regress.
Tutelary religion, in short, is corrected through the validity of the ethical principles of justice and good-will. The cosmological correction of this type of religion is due to the same enlightenment that discredits superstition, a knowledge, namely, of the systematic unity of the cosmos.
Now there is nothing to hinder us from admitting these ideas to possess an objective and hyperbolic existence, except the cosmological ideas, which lead reason into an antinomy: the psychological and theological ideas are not antinomial.
The guarantee for this hypothesis is furnished by the compositions that reflect the cosmological beliefs, the epics and legends that form the second half of the religious productions of Babylonia. Speculation regarding the origin of the universe belongs to an early period in the development of culture.
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