. A claim thus
livingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity and fulness which
no thought of an 'ideal' backing can render more complete; while if, on
the other hand, the heart's response is withheld, the stubborn
phenomenon is there of an impotence in the claims {197} which the
universe embodies, which no talk about an eternal nature of things can
gloze over or dispel. An ineffective _a priori_ order is as impotent a
thing as an ineffective God; and in the eye of philosophy, it is as
hard a thing to explain.

We may now consider that what we distinguished as the metaphysical
question in ethical philosophy is sufficiently answered, and that we
have learned what the words 'good,' 'bad,' and 'obligation' severally
mean. They mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support.
They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold or
anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds.

Wherever such minds exist, with judgments of good and ill, and demands
upon one another, there is an ethical world in its essential features.
Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out
from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving
souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution
as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could
harbor. It would be a tragic constitution, because the rock's
inhabitants would die. But while they lived, there would be real good
things and real bad things in the universe; there would be obligations,
claims, and expectations; obediences, refusals, and disappointments;
compunctions and longings for harmony to come again, and inward peace
of conscience when it was restored; there would, in short, be a moral
life, whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity of
interest in each other with which the hero and heroine might be endowed.

{198}

We, on this terrestrial globe, so far as the visible facts go, are just
like the inhabitants of such a rock. Whether a God exist, or whether
no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an
ethical republic here below. And the first reflection which this leads
to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe
where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there
is a God as well. 'The religion of humanity' affords a basis for
ethics as well as theism does. Whether the pure