62. Friedrich Jodl “The Nature and Aims of the Ethical Movement in Germany”

I have often spoken in this journal of the revolutionization of minds in the nineteenth century. I have said that by delving into the essence of nature and through bold, free self-knowledge, we are on the way to building a world view that will drive the religious ideas that have prevailed in past centuries out of people's minds and hearts. But I have also always emphasized that the modern free world view is only slowly taking hold of the minds, and that backward views, dressed up again and again with a little new make-up, stand in the way of the triumphant course of this world view. Only those who penetrate into the spirit of the scientific knowledge of this century and are able to grasp the position of man in the world with the free view gained through this penetration are called to speak about the demands of modern times. However, there are people who are unable to gain the necessary clear view. They then try to salvage all possible scraps of the old world view for the new age and want to use such heirlooms to have a reforming effect on the present. Among them are the leaders of the so-called "Society for Ethical Culture". I can see this anew from a pamphlet that has just appeared in its second edition and bears the title: "The nature and aims of the ethical movement in Germany". It was written by the Viennese philosophy professor Friedrich Jodl. One gets an idea of the philosophy that the learned gentleman represents when one reads his sentences (p. 15): "We are based on the conviction that there is a science of moral life, as there is a natural science, as there is a science of economic life; and that the time is past, irretrievably past, when science existed at all only in the service and as a component of religion." The brain is reluctant to contemplate such sentences. Esteemed Professor! There is only one view of the world, and our moral knowledge flows from it, just like our economic and scientific knowledge. And those who have moral, scientific and economic knowledge running side by side have not yet arrived at a unified world view. As long as this world view was based on religious revelation, it had to have a moral view in the sense of this revelation in its wake. And anyone who draws his world view not from the Bible, but from modern knowledge of nature and humanity, must also arrive at moral convictions that are in the spirit of this knowledge. And ethics, as this professor of philosophy wants it to be, is its goal (p. 15): "harmonious shaping of the personality, inner aptitude of will and character and the welfare and capacity for development of the sex" and which wants to achieve this goal without taking any world view as a basis and without any outflow of it, is a sum of empty phrases. But the society that has been established to cultivate such ethics is an education without content that wants to cultivate a morality built on nothing, because it is incapable of building ethics in the sense of modern knowledge.