the useful and detrimental. With the disappearance of the idea
of sin as a transgression of the divine law, the correlated idea of
holiness also disappears from the system of ethical naturalism. Besides,
blessedness, complete harmony of the outer and inner man with the ideal in
the state of mankind as well as of every individual, complete realization
of the highest good for the whole as well as for the single through the
means of moral work and perfection on the part of man and of holy and
loving guidance and endowment on the part of God, is an aim which
naturalism is not able to acknowledge, since, according to it, mankind and
individuals continue in the ever-flowing stream of earthly incompletion
until both reach their destiny in annihilation. A moral order of the world
is an impossibility to it, since no holy and loving Ruler and Governor of
the world, but only a blind mechanism, causes the course of things.
Finally, the personality of man can be only perceived in its worth and in
its full importance, when, in the first place, it is in the possession of
freedom, of full moral responsibility; and when, in the second place, it
lives beyond the span of its short earthly existence and may hope for a
full realization of {386} all its ideals of virtue and the highest good for
itself as well as for mankind. Both these points must be contested by
monism and naturalism. The place of freedom is taken by absolute
determinism; even man is only a natural product, the highest which
naturalism knows, but still no more than a product of nature; his
personality and his life, bound to the material body, cease with the death
of this body, and therefore never reach the ideal of either morality or
blessedness. All ideals are and must forever remain objective illusions
which came forth out of the power of the corresponding noble impulse,
imaginative objective conceptions of the moral impulses.

Sec. 2. _Scientific Darwinism and Moral Principles._

Whilst Darwinistic naturalism surely injures the moral principles, the
Darwinistic theories are friendly to them, if they, as mere scientific
theories, restrain themselves within the limits of natural science. But in
no other point of the entire realm of contact between the natural and
intellectual sciences is it more difficult to observe the boundary-line
than in reflecting upon the moral self-determination of man; here natural
science is always in danger of going beyond its limits.

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