United States or El Salvador ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
On the one hand, we see socialists of various schools attempting to construct a Utopia in which each man shall be rewarded, not in accordance with his opportunities of growing rich at the expense of his fellow-man, but according to the services he performs; while, on the other hand, we find the Christian economists striving to induce a harassed and bewildered world to revert to an older and nobler social ethic.
In the year 1844, modern civilization had not yet set in, and Subiaco was, within, what it still appears to be from without, a somewhat gloomy stronghold of the Middle Ages, rearing its battlements and towers in a shadowy gorge, above a mountain torrent, inhabited by primitive and passionate people, dominated by ecclesiastical institutions, and, though distinctly Roman, a couple of hundred years behind Rome itself in all matters ethic and æsthetic.
Spinoza, the most logical and consistent of atheists I mean of those who deny the persistence of individual consciousness through indefinite future time and at the same time the most pious, Spinoza devoted the fifth and last part of his Ethic to elucidating the path that leads to liberty and to determining the concept of happiness. The concept! Concept, not feeling!
Those who are willing to discuss the adoption of the Socialist ethic, which is not combined with any spiritual dogmas, should not refuse to consider the Christian ethic, which might equally be adopted without subscribing to the Christian dogma.
The whole of that recent political ethic which conceives that if we only go far enough we may finish a thing for once and all, that being strong consists chiefly in being deliberately deaf and blind, owes a great deal of its complete sway to his example. Out of him flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern times the supreme maniac of this moonstruck consistency.
The demonstration of the last-quoted proposition, the 11th, is elusive, and I must pass it by, merely observing that the objection that no idea involves existence, and that consequently the idea of God does not involve it, is not a refutation of Spinoza, who might rejoin that it is impossible not to affirm existence of God as the Ethic defines him.
There are a thousand answers to the ethic in Major Barbara which I should be inclined to offer. I might point out that the rich do not so much buy honesty as curtains to cover dishonesty: that they do not so much buy health as cushions to comfort disease.
There are certain broad features of the traditional Chinese civilization which give it its distinctive character. I should be inclined to select as the most important: The use of ideograms instead of an alphabet in writing; The substitution of the Confucian ethic for religion among the educated classes; government by literati chosen by examination instead of by a hereditary aristocracy.
There is probably no department of morality in which a metaphysic of ethic is more conspicuously needed than in that which concerns marriage.
Our feeling upon that subject is simply that we need not trouble about the ethic because it will follow of itself upon the economic revolution. For, as we read history, the economic factor determines all the others. 'Man ist was er isst, as the German said; and morals, art, religion, all the so-called 'ideal activities, are just allotropic forms of bread and meat.
Word Of The Day