joyment of them, the work
at them, is the highest good. Now, since no human individual can enjoy them
all and work at them all at the same time, every individual, as {384} to
disposition, inclination, and circumstances, has to enjoy a part of them,
to work at a part of them, and to renounce a part of them. And since each
single one of these good things, however valuable to the individual, may be
refused to or taken away from him, he has again to learn to be satisfied
with that idea of species, however little it is able to offer him, when
separated from the empiric possessions of this earthly life. Thus with
naturalism the highest good is either mentioned in an abstraction which
does not offer us anything, or which, if we ask the meaning of that
abstraction, is instantly drawn down into the low sphere and the varied
multiformity of empirical and individual life, left to the chance of
individual taste, and confounded with that which is connected with the
highest good only in the second line and in a derived manner--namely, with
the formations and actions of life which strive at and serve the
realization of the highest good. Ethical naturalism is not able to produce
out of itself an objective highest good which is for each individual alike
attractive, rich, and comprehensive.

Moreover, since ethical naturalism proves itself insufficient for the
principles of any and all morality, it is but a natural conclusion that it
is still less able to produce those principles which are characteristic of
the highest representation of human morality known to mankind, namely:
_Christian morality_. Ethical monism has no room for three ethical
fundamental views, whose full possession morality owes to Christianity, and
which gives to Christian morality its highest motive power. One of these is
a deeper conception of evil as a sin, as a positive rebellion against the
good; another is faith in a future {385} absolute realization of the
highest good in an end sometime to be reached by mankind and the individual
and by means of a moral order of the world; and the third is the
acknowledgment of the full worth of personality. Evil--to which of course
no objective valid moral law, but only one conventionally established,
stands opposed--is to ethical naturalism nothing but the action of an
instinct which in this given case is not beneficial to man in his struggle
for existence; the category of good and evil is entirely replaced by the
category of