God.

Without any restriction Christianity has taken over this definition from the mother-religion. In his zeal to claim that God alone is the source of all Morality, St. Augustine allows himself to be carried away to such an extent that he libels mankind most hatefully. Just as for Rousseau man is by nature good, for the Bishop of Hippo he is by nature fundamentally bad. Left to his own devices he would always wallow in the mire of sin and vice, and would never even feel the wish to abandon his wickedness. It is God's mercy alone which rescues him from his depravity and sets his feet upon the path of righteousness, leading him to virtue, salvation and eternal bliss. Thomas Aquinas is no less definite on this point. The scriptures of Judaism and Christianity contain the eternal law which God has ordained for mankind. He points out the paths that man should follow. All Morality springs from Him alone.

To this very day true believers adhere to this doctrine. Morality did not originate on earth; the knowledge of it is a gift of grace from heaven to mankind. It is derived from God; it is that which God has willed; or else it does not need any special act of volition on the part of God, but is the essence of God himself. That is the teaching of Paley, the classical moral philosopher. Virtue consists in doing good to mankind in obedience to the Will of God, and in order to attain eternal salvation. Here stress is laid upon the fact that Morality is active love for one's neighbour, and this is a concession on the part of the conciliatory Englishman to the utilitarian ethics of his countrymen; but for him the necessary and sufficient reason for this love of one's neighbour is the Will of God and the desire for eternal salvation. The German devotee, Baader, blustering like a capuchin, preaches this twaddle: "Any Morality which is not rooted in divine law is the intellectual impiety of our time raised to its highest power; it is the perfection of atheism; for the idea of the absolute autonomy of man atheistically denies the Father as law-giver; the theistic denial of the necessity for divine aid in fulfilling the law does away with the Son or Mediator, and finally the materialistic-pantheistic apotheosis of Matter does away with the Holy Ghost with its sanctifying power." The Frenchman Jouffroy, though more careful and reticent in his manner, unmistakably expresses his conviction that "ethics, as well as the philosophy of law, inevitably and necessarily lead to theology."

But this necessity only exists for minds whose desire for knowledge and truth is easily satisfied by words without a meaning that can be visualized, by fabulous statements accepted without proof, by fictions of the imagination, and by shallow juggling with the association of ideas. Even those who do not approve all Auguste Comte's arguments will agree with him when he classifies the successive steps in the mental development of mankind as the theological, transcendental, and scientific modes of thought. When man's understanding is in its infancy he is content with a supernatural explanation of all phenomena which strike him as mysterious, disquiet him or rouse his curiosity. Only I have never been able to understand why Comte discriminates between the theological and the transcendental modes of thought, and assigns to the latter a higher place than the former. Both are on a footing of absolute equality; both raise arbitrary fictions of the imagination to the position of sources of knowledge; both substitute anthropomorphic trivialities for the observation of phenomena and research into the conditions under which they occur and their relationship to one another. The only difference between them lies in the fact that transcendentalism expresses itself in choicer language than does theology, that it presents formulæ that are more complicated and pretentious, less transparent and honest—formulæ which the unpractised mind does not immediately recognize as mythological dogmas in a pseudo-scientific disguise.

The relationship of theological to transcendental thought is much the same as that of superstition to religion. Both of them are one and the same. Religion is shamefaced superstition, whereas superstition has not yet learned to feel shame. Religion is superstition in a dress-coat, and therefore fit for polite circles; superstition is religion in a cotton smock and therefore cannot be admitted to society. Superstition is the religion of the poor and unassuming, religion is the superstition of fine folk who plume themselves on their formal and verbal scholarship.

Ever since man has risen above the level of the beasts, ever since the first faint glimmerings of thought began in the thick-walled, narrow and dark skull of a hunter of the Neanderthal or Cro Magnon, he has ascribed everything unintelligible in life and in the world around him to divine actions and divine sources. How did the world come into existence? A god or gods created it. How does Nature work? In accordance with the will of a god or gods, in obedience to divine commands, as a result of divine activities. What is life? A divine gift of grace. What is consciousness? An irradiation of the divinity. What is infinity, what eternity? Attributes of the god. God is the name that from the beginning of time to the present day men have given to their ignorance. They find it easier to bear disguised by this pseudonym; they are even proud of it. With cunning self-deception they have endowed the word with the dignity pertaining to a title of the most awe-inspiring majesty, and they no longer feel ashamed of a poverty of mind which can boast of such a magnificent name. Morality also is one of those phenomena which are not intelligible as a matter of course. The questions how, whence, why, and to what end Morality exists, and what it is, cannot be solved at a glance; its life-history is not apparent to every observer, as is that of the domestic cat. But why cudgel one's brains? Cheap explanations are ready to hand. This way mythology, you maid-of-all-work! Morality has been ordained by God. A moral life is one in accordance with God's commandments. He who will not content himself with this answer is an infidel and does not deserve to have any notice taken of him.

Let us leave the paltry statements of theologians and note how men who investigate questions more thoroughly have dealt with Morality. Descartes defines Morality as the sustained endeavour to do that which one has recognized to be right. It is difficult to discern in this definition the father of scientific scepticism. What are the distinguishing marks of Right? Is the decision as to what is right and what is wrong to be left to the subjective judgment of the individual? In that case Descartes must concede that the action of a burglar is moral, if he has recognized that it is right for him to perpetrate his crime between two and three o'clock in the morning, that being the most favourable time for it, and then strives to the best of his ability to effect an entrance into the building he has selected, at the moment which he has recognized as the right one. Or shall all mankind, or at least the majority, and not the individual, decide what is right? In that case the definition would certainly approximate to the one which I hold to be true; but for one thing it would suffer from vagueness; and, moreover, its originator would lay himself open to the reproach of not having shown why the individual is worthy of praise when he acts in accordance with the convictions of the majority, though these be opposed to his own, and in so doing allows his action to be determined by a judgment due to a psychic mechanism other than his.

Spinoza's "Ethics" leaves the reader in great discomfort, the result of vacillating and contradictory