PROCEEDINGS OF THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY. NEW SERIES. – VOL. V. Containing the Papers read before the Society during the PUBLISHED BY WILLIAMS AND NORGATE, 14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON, W.C. 1905. Price Ten Shillings and Sixpence nett. PAPERS READ BEFORE THE SOCIETY, 1904-1905. I.-MORAL OBJECTIVITY AND ITS POSTULATES. By HASTINGS RASHDALL. I. A CURIOUS revolution seems of late to have taken place in the attitude of the higher speculative Philosophy towards Morality. There was a time when all idealistic or spiritualistic Philosophy, whatever its attitude towards Religion and Theology, was regarded as the unswerving ally not merely of practical Morality but of what may be called the theoretical claims of the Moral Law. Kant used Morality to build up again, as he thought on firmer foundations, the spiritual structure which the critical Philosophy had speculatively overthrown. The idealistic Philosophers who followed him, amid all divergencies, were agreed in this-that Morality is rational and moral obligation no mere subjective experience of the human mind. Even Hegel, though his attitude towards evil, his thoroughgoing vindication of things as they are-from the Universe at large down to the Prussian Constitution in Church and State-paved the way for moral scepticism, still believed that Religion, as he conceived it, was the ally, the natural complement and crown, of Morality, and he did not quarrel with the Christian teaching about the love and goodness of God. Still more intimate was the association of an enthusiastic belief in the Moral Law with a philosophical Theology in the minds of more or less Hegelian English Idealists like Green. At the present day there are many A |