Note A — A LECTURE

Those especially who teach that generally speaking the knowledge, pleasure, and perfection of each individual is, for him, good, their opposites bad, and that all else is in itself indifferent, will perhaps protest against my classing them among the subjectivists. It might even seem on a superficial survey, that they have set up a doctrine of the good equally valid for all. But on a more careful examination we find that this teaching does not even in a single instance, hold one and the same object to be good universally. For example, my own knowledge is, according to this view, for me worthy of love; for every one else indifferent in itself, while the knowledge of another individual is in itself for me indifferent. It is curious to observe theistic thinkers, as often happens, setting up a subjectivistic view respecting the good, valid of all mortal loving and willing, while, at the same time assuming that God, without respect of person, estimates every perfection by a kind of objective standard. This exception with regard to the loving and willing of God and the notion of Him as eternal Judge is then meant to render harmless in respect of its practical consequences, the egoism which such a principle implies.

Of the celebrated controversy between Bossuet and Fenelon it may be said that the great bishop of Meaux advocated a kind of subjectivism. Fenelon’s theses, though he advocated a system of morality neither ignoble nor unchristian, were finally condemned by the Church of Rome, though it did not go so far as to reject his teaching as heretical. Otherwise one would really be compelled to condemn also those fine glowing lines attributed by many to St. Theresa, that in a very imperfect Latin translation have found their way into many Catholic prayer-books which is much more than their escaping the ecclesiastical censor. I give them translated directly from the Spanish:

The teaching of Thomas Aquinas has often been so represented as though it were pure subjectivism. It is true that much of his teaching sounds quite subjectivistic (cf. e.g. Summ. theol. 1a. q. 80, art. 1, especially the objections and replies as well as the passages in which he declares that the happiness of each is the highest and final end, asserting even of the saints in heaven that each rightly desires more his own blessedness than the blessedness of all others). Along with these, however, are to be found statements in which he soars above this subjectivistic view as, for example, when he declares (as Plato and Aristotle before him and Descartes and Leibnitz after) that everything which exists is good as such, not good merely as a means but also—a point which pure subjectivists (as recently Sigwart, Vorfr. d. Ethik, p. 6) expressly deny—good in itself, and again, when he affirms that in case any one—an impossible case—had at any time to choose between his own eternal ruin and an injury to the Divine love, the right course would be to prefer his own eternal unhappiness.

There the moral feeling of western Christendom touches the feeling of the heathen Hindu, as is shown in a somewhat strange story of a maiden who renounces her own everlasting blessedness for the salvation of the rest of the world; as also that of a positivist thinker like Mill when he declares sooner than bow in prayer before a being not truly good, “to hell he will go.” I knew a Catholic priest who, on account of this utterance of Mill’s, voted for him at the parliamentary election.