er, is the goal and the test of human perfection, and that
nothing below this--nothing which aims or aspires at anything less than
this--deserves the name of virtue. Bossuet defended the selfish theory of
virtue, attacked his amiable antagonist with unconscionable severity and
bitterness, and succeeded in obtaining from the court of Rome--though
against the wishes of the Pope--the condemnation of the obnoxious tenet.
The Pope remarked, with well-turned antithesis, that Fenelon might have
erred from excess in the love of God, while Bossuet had sinned by defect
in the love of his neighbor.

Among the recent French moralists, the most distinguished names are those
of *Jouffroy* and *Cousin*, who--each with a terminology of his own--agree
with Malebranche in regarding right and wrong as inherent and essential
characteristics of actions, and as having their source and the ground of
their validity in the nature of things. The aim of Cousin's well-known
treatise on "The True, the Beautiful, and the Good," is purely ethical,
and the work is designed to identify the three members of the Platonic
triad with corresponding attributes of the Infinite Being,--attributes
which, virtually one, have their counterpart and manifestation in the
order of nature and the government of the universe.

* * * * *

In *Germany*, the necessarian philosophers of the Pantheistic school
ignore ethics by making choice and moral action impossible. Man has no
distinct and separate personality. He is for a little while detached in
appearance from the soul of the universe (_anima mundi_), but in reality
no more detached from it than is a boulder or a log of drift-wood from the
surface on which it rests. He still remains a part of the universal soul,
the multiform, all-embracing God, who is himself not a self-conscious,
freely willing being, but impelled by necessity in all his parts and
members, and, no less than in all else, in those human members through
which alone he attains to some fragmentary self-consciousness.

According to *Kant*, the reason intuitively discerns truths that are
necessary, absolute, and universal. The theoretical reason discerns such
truths in the realm of ontology, and in the relations and laws that
underlie all subjects of physical inquiry. In like manner, the practical
reason intuitively perceives the conditions and laws inherent in the
objects of moral action,--that is, as Malebranche would hav