an embodiment of volition, not a description of it.
It is the expression of living interest, preference, and categorical
choice. It leaves to psychology and history a free field for the
description of moral phenomena. It has no interest in slipping
far-fetched and incredible myths beneath the facts of nature, so as to
lend a non-natural origin to human aspirations. It even recognises, as
an emanation of its own force, that uncompromising truthfulness with
which science assigns all forms of moral life to their place in the
mechanical system of nature. But the rational moralist is not on that
account reduced to a mere spectator, a physicist acknowledging no
interest except the interest in facts and in the laws of change. His own
spirit, small by the material forces which it may stand for and express,
is great by its prerogative of surveying and judging the universe;
surveying it, of course, from a mortal point of view, and judging it
only by its kindliness or cruelty to some actual interest, yet, even so,
determining unequivocally a part of its constitution and excellence. The
rational moralist represents a force energising in the world,
discovering its affinities there and clinging to them to the exclusion
of their hateful opposites. He represents, over against the chance
facts, an ideal embodying the particular demands, possibilities, and
satisfactions of a specific being.

This dogmatic position of reason is not uncritically dogmatic; on the
contrary, it is the sophistical position that is uncritically neutral.
All criticism needs a dogmatic background, else it would lack objects
and criteria for criticism. The sophist himself, without confessing it,
enacts a special interest. He bubbles over with convictions about the
pathological and fatal origin of human beliefs, as if that could prevent
some of them from being more trustworthy and truer than others. He is
doubtless right in his psychology; his own ideas have their natural
causes and their chance of signifying something real. His scepticism
may represent a wider experience than do the fanaticisms it opposes. But
this sceptic also lives. Nature has sent her saps abundantly into him,
and he cannot but nod dogmatically on that philosophical tree on which
he is so pungent a berry. His imagination is unmistakably fascinated by
the pictures it happens to put together. His judgment falls unabashed,
and his discourse splashes on in its dialectical march, every
stepping-ston