Let us look at Professor Jodl's examination of the historical position of Kantian Ethics. The element of non-interest in ethical judgment we find not to have been first emphasised by Kant. Whatever the success and worth of their speculations, a great many of Kant's predecessors sought to realise this very factor in their systems; thus it was with Plato as opposed to Protagoras, with Shaftesbury and Butler as opposed to Hobbes, Locke, and Hume; while Cudworth, Clarke, Wollaston, and Price were similarly actuated by the purely speculative consideration. Kant's real and original advance upon previous systems of ethics, was his emphasis of the element of conscious volition in ethical judgment and the statement of its imperative character. It was just in this last respect that his ethical philosophy formed so marked a contrast to the eudæmonism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The imperative and absolute nature of duty, eudæmonism neglected to inculcate; Kant aroused the conscience of his time, and presented in contrast to the moral weakness then prevalent the strength and earnest grandeur of an absolute conception of duty.
So too in the conflict between the metaphysics of ethics and the practical postulates, wherein the great philosopher displayed so much ingenuity, Professor Jodl is unable to distinguish Kant's position very sharply from that of the English intellectualists when in a similar plight. Not that the idea of the practical postulates is valueless; this Professor Jodl afterwards explains. Our historian merely shows that Kant had not yet gotten clear of the ancient conflict that had agitated the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages as well as the utilitarian and rationalistic theologians of more modern times. Yet despite the mysticism that inheres in Kant's argument for the practical existence of God, the kernel of the truth he emphasises in the alliance of ethics with religion still remains; namely that religious ideas are essentially ethical, that in this relation only have they meaning, and that religious ideas which are ethically valueless are to be uncompromisingly discarded.
Especial attention should be called to Professor Jodl's estimate of Feuerbach, whose merits have been strangely neglected. Feuerbach's ethical system, in perfect form, has not been independently set forth in his works, but is intermingled with the subjects dealt with in his religious treatises. Yet he left few of the fundamental questions of ethics untouched and his works contain a great store of most excellent and pertinent thoughts which must be characterised, says our author, in the widest sense of the term, as the real foundation in ethics of modern scientific empiricism.