[324] “_Epigramme_,” Venice, 1790. [“I could never abide any of those freedom-gospellers. All that they ever wanted was to get things running so as to suit themselves. If you are anxious to set people free, just make a beginning by trying to serve them. The simplest attempt will teach you how dangerous this effort may be.”] [325] See Chapter IX. [326] On what grounds does Professor Bosanquet think of “compensating justice” as a naïve idea? It is on the contrary one of the highest and deepest, and one of the most comprehensive to which the human mind has ever attained--giving rise to the various theogonies and theodicies and religious systems of mankind. It is at the bottom, for example, of the theodicy and the philosophy of Leibniz, the founder of the Rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. [327] Could any system of ethics which took such an impossible and such a belated conception of the individual be regarded as ethics at all? [328] I do not think that this is a fair preliminary description of the problem of teleology. A person who believes in the realization of purpose in some experiences with which he thinks himself to be acquainted does not plead for the guidance of the universe by finite minds, but simply for a view of it that shall include the truth of human purposes. And of course there may be in the universe beings other than ourselves who also realize purposes. [329] Italics and exclamation mine. [330] Italics mine. There is a large element of truth in this great idea of Professor Bosanquet’s, connecting [for our purposes] his philosophy with the theism and the personalism for which we are contending as the only true and real basis for Humanism. [331] Readers who remember Green’s _Prolegomena to Ethics_ will remember that it is one of the difficulties of that remarkable, but one-sided, production (exposed, I think, with many other defects in Professor Taylor’s brilliant, but unduly intellectualistic _Problem of Conduct_) that it also seems to teach a kind of “Determinism” in ethics, in what our nature is unduly communicated to us by the Absolute, or the “Eternal Consciousness.” This whole way of looking at things must largely be abandoned to-day. [332] See below, p. 226.