Thus all moral consciousness, and even all vital preference might
ultimately be superseded: they might appear to have belonged to a partial
and rather low stage in the self-development of consciousness.
With this dissolution of his moral judgments always in prospect, why
should Bradley, or any idealist, have pursued ethical studies at all?
Since all phases of life were equally necessary to enrich an infinite
consciousness, which must know both good and evil in order to merge and to
transcend them, he could hardly nurse any intense enthusiasm for a
different complexion to be given to the lives of men. His moral
passion--for he had it, caustic and burning clear--was purely
intellectual: it was shame that in England the moral consciousness should
have been expressed in systems dialectically so primitive as those of the
positivists and utilitarians. He acknowledged, somewhat superciliously,
that their hearts were in the right place; yet, if we are to have ethics
at all, were not their thoughts in the right place also? They were
concerned not with analysis of the moral consciousness but with the
conduct of affairs and the reform of institutions. The spectacle of human
wretchedness profoundly moved them; their minds were bent on transforming
society, so that a man's station and its duties might cease to be what a
decayed feudal organisation and an inhuman industrialism had made of them.
They revolted against the miserable condition of the masses of mankind,
and against the miserable consolations which official religion, or a
philosophy like Bradley's, offered them in their misery.
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