_His_ moral
world is the counterpart of _his_ moral growth as a character. Goodness
_for him_ directly depends upon his recognition of it. Animals,
presumably, have no moral ideal, because they have not the power to
constitute it. In morals, as in knowledge, the mind of man constructs
its own world. And yet, in both alike, the world of truth or of goodness
exists all the same whether the individual knows it or not. He does not
call the moral law into being, but finds it without, and then realizes
it in his own life. The moral law does not vanish and reappear with its
recognition by mankind. It is not subject to the chances and changes of
its life, but a good in itself that is eternal.

Is it therefore independent of all intelligence? Can goodness be
anything but the law of a self-conscious being? Is it the quality or
motive or ideal of a mere thing? Manifestly not. Its relation to
self-consciousness is essential. With the extinction of
self-consciousness all moral goodness is extinguished.

The same holds true of reality. The question of the reality or unreality
of things cannot arise except in an intelligence. Animals have neither
illusions nor truths--unless they are self-conscious. The reality, which
man sets over against his own inadequate knowledge, is posited by him;
and it has no meaning whatsoever except in this contrast. And to
endeavour to conceive a reality which no one knows, is to assert a
relative term without its correlative, which is absurd; it is to posit
an ideal which is opposed to nothing actual.

In this view, so commonly held in our day, that knowledge is subjective
and reality unknowable, we have another example of the falseness and
inconsistency of abstract thinking. If this error be committed, there is
no fundamental gain in saying with Kant, that things are relative to the
thought of all, instead of asserting, with Berkeley or Browning, that
they are relative to the thought of each. The final result is the same.
Things as known, are reduced into mere creations of thought; things as
they are, are regarded as not thoughts, and as partaking in no way of
the nature of thought. And yet "reality" is virtually assumed to be
given at the beginning of knowledge; for the sensations are supposed to
be emanations from it, or roused in consciousness by it. These
sensations, it is said, man does not make, but receives, and receives
from the concealed reality. They flow from it, and are the
manifestations