184 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
have already regulated it. They can be regarded as effec-
tive causes like any others—they are purposes only for
the subject. Hence, we deal with them as with anatural
history of moral ideas.
Apart from this, there can be no science of ethical
norms.
Some people have tried to retain the normative charac-
ter of moral laws—at least, to the extent that they have
understood ethics as if it were analogous to dietetics. Di-
etetics derives general rules from the organism’s require-
ments for life, so as then to affect the body on the basis of
these rules.^2 But the comparison between ethics and di-
etetics is false because our moral life cannot be compared
with the life of the organism. The organism’s activity ex-
ists without any contribution on our part. We find its laws
already present in the world. Hence we can seek the laws
and apply those that we have found. But moral laws are
first created by us. Before they are created, we cannot ap-
ply them. The error arises because moral laws are not cre-
ated at each moment with a new content, but are
inherited. Thus moral laws, inherited from one’s ances-
tors, appear to be given, like the natural laws of the organ-
ism. But they are in no way applied by a later generation
with the same legitimacy as the rules of diet. For moral
laws deal with the individual and not, like natural law,
- Cf. Paulsen,System der Ethik System of Ethics. Friedrich
Paulsen (1846–1908) was a German philosopher, educator, and pro-
fessor, who elaborated a theory of “panpsychism” and wrote on Kant
and the history of German education.
[7]
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