What is morality, then?  It is subjective.  It has no objective validity.  A moral conduct highly valued by our fathers is now held to be immoral by us.  Immoral acts now strongly denounced by us may be regarded as moral by our posterity.  Good deeds of the savage are not necessarily good in the eyes of the civilized, nor evil acts of the Orientals are necessarily evil before the face of the Occidentals.  It follows, then, that there is no definite standard of morality in any place at any time.

If morality be merely subjective, and there be no objective standard, how can you distinguish evil from good?  How can you single out angels from among devils?  Was not Socrates a criminal?  Was not Jesus also a criminal?  How could you know Him to be a Divine man different from other criminals who were crucified with Him?  What you honour may I not denounce as disgrace?  What you hold as duty may I not condemn as sin?  Every form of idealism is doomed, after all, to end in such confusion and scepticism.  We cannot embrace radical idealism, which holds these threefold sceptical views in her womb.

13.  An Illusion concerning Appearance and Reality.

To get Enlightened we must next dispel an illusion respecting appearance and reality.  According. to certain religionists, all the phenomena of the universe are to succumb to change.  Worldly things one and all are evanescent.  They are nought in the long run.  Snowcapped mountains may sink into the bottom of the deep, while the sands in the fathomless ocean may soar into the azure sky at some time or other.  Blooming flowers are destined to fade and to bloom again in the next year.  So destined are growing trees, rising generations, prospering nations, glowing suns, moons, and stars.  This, they would say, is only the case with phenomena or appearances, but not with reality.  Growth and decay, birth and death, rise and fall, all these are the ebb and flow of appearances in the ocean of reality, which is always the same.  Flowers may fade and be reduced to dust, yet out of that dust come flowers.  Trees may die out, yet they are reproduced somewhere else.  The time may come when the earth will become a dead sphere quite unsuitable for human habitation, and the whole of mankind will perish; yet who knows that whether another earth may not be produced as man’s home?  The sun might have its beginning and end, stars, moons, theirs as well; yet an infinite universe would have no beginning nor end.

Again, they say, mutation is of the world of sense or phenomenal appearances, but not of reality.  The former are the phases of the latter shown to our senses.  Accordingly they are always limited and modified by our senses, just as images are always limited and modified by the mirror in which they are reflected.  On this account appearances are subject to limitations, while reality is limitless.  And it follows that the former are imperfect, while the latter is perfect; that the former is transient, while the latter is eternal; that the former is relative, while the latter is absolute; that the former is worldly, while the latter is holy; that the former is knowable, while the latter is unknowable.