The new ideal is that of renunciation, obedience, and resignation. Ethically this expresses itself in _pietism_. Virtue is good neither in itself nor on account of its consequences, but because it is conformable to the will of God. The extreme inwardness of this ideal is characteristic of an age that despaired of attainment, whether of pleasure or knowledge. To all, even the persecuted, it is permitted to obey, and so gain entrance into the kingdom of the children of God. But as every special study tends to rely upon its own conceptions, pietism, involving as it does a relation to God, is replaced by _rigorism_ and _intuitionism_. The former doctrine defines virtue in terms of the inner attitude which it expresses. It must be done in the spirit of dutifulness, _because one ought_, and through sheer respect for the law which one's moral nature affirms. _Intuitionism_ has attempted to deal with the source of the moral law by defining conscience as a _special faculty_ or sense, qualified to pass directly upon moral questions, and deserving of implicit obediences. It is characteristic of this whole tendency to look for the spring of virtuous living, not in a good which such living obtains, but in a law to which it owes obedience. [Sidenote: Duty and Freedom. Ethics and Metaphysics.] § 84. This third general ethical tendency has thus been of the greatest importance in emphasizing the _consciousness of duty_, and has brought both hedonism and rationalism to a recognition of its fundamental importance. Ethics must deal not only with the moral ideal, but also with the ground of its appeal to the individual, and his obligation to pursue it. In connection with this recognition of moral responsibility, the problem of human _freedom_ has come to be regarded in the light of an inevitable point of contact between ethics and metaphysics. That which is absolutely binding upon the human will can be determined only in view of some theory of its ultimate nature. On this account the rationalistic and hedonistic motives are no longer abstractly sundered, as in the days of the Stoics and Epicureans, but tend to be absorbed in broader philosophical tendencies. Hedonism appears as the sequel to naturalism; or, more rarely, as part of a theistic system whose morality is divine legislation enforced by an appeal to motives of pleasure and pain. Rationalism, on the other hand, tends to be absorbed in rationalistic or idealistic philosophies, where man's rational nature is construed as his bond of kinship with the universe.