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CONTEMPORARY VEDANTA PHILOSOPHY, CONTINUED
scheme of reality. Metaphysics thus depends in part upon ethics for its data, but ethics depends upon metaphysics for the justification of its ultimate principles. The chief purpose of the book is to bring out the metaphysical implications of moral consciousness.
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Moral judgments, like all judgments, are eternally true or false. The reality to which they refer is relative, since nothing is good except through its relation to other things, but not subjective. Judgments of value presuppose an objectively real standard of value, the ideal, in relation to which things can appear as good. Moral experience shows, however, that the ideal has yet to be realized. We are not what we ought to be. The ideal does not possess the sort of reality found in the natural world, nor could it be the ideal if it did. Attempts to define the ideal as the Good, as God, or as the Absolute are inadequate. The ideal is eternally existent, else moral judgments could not be true. It has absolute knowledge (inseparable from the being of things known), else it could not be infallible. It possesses ultimate satisfactoriness, bliss. It can be conceived, therefore, as absolute existence, knowledge, and bliss.
This definition of the ideal, however, does not explain why it is our duty to pursue it. To understand our duty we must inquire into our own nature. As pure subject of knowledge the self is identical with the ideal. But as active the self is a distinct individual related to others, an identity in difference requiring to be changed, the object of the moral judgment, "I ought to be good." The self as active is an appearance, that is, something which is real but lacks stability, and so part of the changing empirical world. The history of the world is a tendency toward the realization of the ideal. The tendency of the self as known in moral consciousness is also to realize the ideal. The attraction of the ideal is the root of both physical and moral law. But the self really is the ideal, so that moral compulsion is the compulsion of our own nature, that is, freedom. Our only duty is to be ourselves, and the expression of this self-realization is through love. for our fellow beings, who are all appearances of the one self. Moral consciousness is the evidence for our unity with all mankind, and this unity is the justification of our moral obligation.
The mature critical stage of Professor Das's philosophy, as
