ABSTRACT
Metaphysical personalism has a deeper ethical root in the thought of a "collective person". That the individual, isolated and for himself, is an abstraction, that he does not emerge except in larger contexts of persons and is conditioned not only in his existence but also in his ethos by his context, is an ancient view. Now if personality is bound to a consciousness, "persons of a higher order" can evidently be attached only to a consciousness of a higher order. Above the individual person there are corporate bodies which in fact show a certain analogy to personality proper: family, race, nation, State. The whole doctrine of personalism, together with its theo logically questionable consequence, would be ultimately a matter of indifference to ethics if it did not indirectly foster an axiological prejudice.
