Cohen and Herrmann attempt to reach an ethic which is a consistent unity by using logic to put a content into the empty categorical imperative of Kant. They wish to make good what he missed in his _Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten_ (Foundations for a Metaphysic of Morals) and in his _Metaphysik der Sitten_ (A Metaphysic of Morals). Cohen finds the origin of ethics in the pure Will thinking out the idea of one’s fellow-man and that of the associating of men to form a state, his ethical ego being brought into existence by this logical operation. The ethic thus attained consists in honesty, modesty, loyalty, justice, and humanity, and culminates in the representation of the state as the highest creation of the moral spirit. But that this ethic is only the offspring of mental ability is betrayed by the whole story of its appearance. The “pure will” is an abstraction which cannot start anything. Instead of obtaining an ethic by deduction, using abstract logical methods, Wilhelm Herrmann opens for it the back-door of experience. He does indeed make ethics consist in “the bowing of the individual before the power [pg 185] of a something which is universally valid in thought,” but that content of ethics which is a necessity of thought we are to reach by seeing ourselves in each other as if in a mirror, and deciding what kind of conduct makes us mutually “reliable.” The thought of the unconditional claim originates, therefore, spontaneously in us, but awakes to the fact that it is determined by its content “through experience of human intercourse, and in the relation of reliability.” Herrmann did not carry this philosophic ethic through to completion. He sketches it as an introduction to a not less artificial theological ethic. His conception is allied to Adam Smith’s theory of the impartial third party (see page 82). Martineau, Green, Bradley, Laurie, Seth, and Royce