ers--this is indeed the first principle of a
morality of action.

[Sidenote: The Ethical Community.]

Sect. 145. But a type of ethics still further removed from the initial
relativism has been adopted and more or less successfully assimilated by
subjectivistic philosophies. Accepting Berkeley's spirits, with their
indefinite capacities, and likewise the stability of the ideal
principles that underlie a God-administered world, and morality becomes
the obedience which the individual renders to the law. The individual,
free to act in his own right, cooperates with the purposes of the
general spiritual community, whose laws are worthy of obedience though
not coercive. The recognition of such a spiritual citizenship, entailing
opportunities, duties, and obligations, rather than thraldom, partakes
of the truth as well as the inadequacy of common-sense.

[Sidenote: The Religion of Mysticism.]

Sect. 146. As for religion, at least two distinct practical
appreciations of the universe have been historically associated with
this chapter in philosophy. The one of these is the mysticism of
Schopenhauer, the religious sequel to a universalistic voluntarism.
Schopenhauer's ethics, his very philosophy, is religion. For the good
and the true are alike attainable only through identification with the
Absolute Will. This consummation of life, transcending practical and
theoretical differences, engulfing and effacing all qualities and all
values, is like the Nirvana of the Orient--a positive ideal only for one
who has appraised the apparent world at its real value.

"Rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the
entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full
of will certainly nothing; but, conversely, to those in whom
the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world,
which is so real, with all it's suns and milky-ways--is
nothing."[304:27]

[Sidenote: The Religion of Individual Cooperation with God.]

Sect. 147. From the union of the two motives of voluntarism and
individualism springs another and a more familiar type of religion, that
of cooperative spiritual endeavor. In the religion of Schopenhauer the
soul must utterly lose itself for the sake of peace; here the soul must
persist in its own being and activity for the sake of the progressive
goodness of the world. For Schopenhauer God is the universal solution,
in which all motions cease and all differences disapp