ing forth a new
world, must there not be some spiritual power or energy, some dynamic
force, which, while it is within man, is also without, and independent
of, him? 'Duty for duty's sake' lacks lifting power, and is the essence
of legalism. Love, after all, is the fulfilling of the law.

2. To overcome the Kantian abstraction, and give content to the formal
law of reason was the aim of the idealistic writers who succeeded him.
Fichte conceived of morality as action--self-consciousness realising
itself in a world of deeds. Hegel started with the _Idea_ as the source
of all reality, and developed the conception of Personality attaining
self-realisation through the growing consciousness of the world and of
God. Personality involves capacity. The {113} law of life, therefore,
is, 'Be a person and respect others as persons.'[14] Man only comes to
himself as he becomes conscious that his life is rooted in a larger self.
Morality is just the gradual unfolding of an eternal purpose whose whole
is the perfection of humanity. It has been objected that the idea of
life as an evolutionary process, which finds its most imposing embodiment
in the system of Hegel, if consistently carried out, destroys all
personal motive and self-determining activity, and reduces the history of
the world to a soulless mechanism. Hegel himself was aware of this
objection, and the whole aim of his philosophy was to show that
personality has no meaning if it be not the growing consciousness of the
infinite. The more recent exponents of his teaching have endeavoured to
prove that the individual, so far from being suppressed, is really
_expressed_ in the process, that, indeed, while the universal life
underlies, unifies, and directs the particular phases of existence, the
individual in realising himself is at the same time determining and
evolving the larger spiritual world--a world already implicitly present
in his earliest consciousness and first strivings. The absolute is
indeed within us from the very beginning, but we have to work it out.
Hence life is achieved through conflict. The universe is not a place for
pleasure or apathy. It is a place for soul-making. No rest is to be
found by an indolent withdrawal from the world of reality. 'In one way
or another, in labour, in learning, and in religion, every man has his
pilgrimage to make, his self to remould and to acquire, his world and
surroundings to transform. . . . It is in this adven