i^ 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 OF 
 
 ABSTRACT ETHICS
 
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 C. F. CLAY, Manager 
 
 iLontlon: FETTER LANE, E.G. 
 
 lEninfaursf) : loo PRINCES STREET 
 
 
 _t • i. 
 
 IP 
 i *'l 
 
 
 ^.tia Sort;: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 JSombnjj, ffalctitta anO JHatiras: MACMILI.AN AND Co., Ltd. 
 
 Coronto: J. M. DENT AND SONS, Ltd. 
 
 eroh«o: THE MARUZEN-KAnUSHIKI-KAISHA 
 
 A// rights reserved
 
 THE THEORY 
 
 OF 
 
 ABSTRACT ETHICS 
 
 by 
 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER 
 
 Author of The Neo-Platonists 
 
 Cambridge : 
 
 at the University Press 
 
 1916
 
 Cambrtligr : 
 
 PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
 
 YJh\± 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE present work is the result of long reflections, but 
 was actually called forth by Professor Juvalta's 
 Old and New Problem of Morality, to which my attention 
 was drawn by Mr Benn's review in Mind (January, 1915). 
 The instantaneous impression made by the review, in 
 spite of the reviewer's disagreement with the author, 
 was, "This is the doctrine of which I was in search." 
 Though "awakened from dogmatic slumber" by Re- 
 nouvier {Mind and the Critique Philosophique, 1887), I 
 had for long continued the attempt to derive the ethical 
 law of justice from "ends" or "goods." This is of course 
 the tradition of Enghsh ethics ; and my own resistance to 
 Renouvier's Kantianism was only one expression of the 
 effort of Enghsh thought to avoid the "a priori.'''' The 
 a priori, however, in some sense, cannot be avoided. 
 English Experientiahsm, largely justified though it was 
 and is, must inevitably be modified in the end by the 
 Continental Rationalism that found its most powerful 
 expression in Kant. 
 
 On this, I am glad to find myself in agreement with 
 Mr Bertrand Russell, whose case is, I think, similar to 
 my own. That is to say, he has been brought to this 
 position, not by the desire to find support, denied by 
 English philosophy in its unofficial tradition, for extra- 
 philosophical convictions, but by the force of intellectual 
 
 96881-3
 
 VI PREFACE 
 
 necessity. Still, having arrived at a modified view, we 
 must "follow the argument"; and, if a metaphysical 
 doctrine emerges that is more in harmony with the moral 
 aspirations of mankind, we must not refuse to consider 
 it out of a kind of willed austerity. There is, I think, 
 something of this in Mr Russell. For my own part, 
 whether on one side or the other, I decline to accept any 
 limitations but those of necessity. As I refuse to decide 
 for a doctrine simply on the ground that it is good for 
 us to beheve it, so also I refuse to bar out the considera- 
 tion of it simply on the ground that we cannot arrive at 
 scientific certainty. 
 
 The acceptance of an element of a priori law in ethics 
 has at the present time a very distinct practical bearing. 
 If by reflective thought, without reference to ends egoistic 
 or altruistic, we recognise in ourselves and others rights 
 which it is ethically wrong that any force should suppress, 
 then, even in the hour of a defeat supposed final in the 
 universe, the idea of right would still aSirm itself : " Vic- 
 trix causa dels placuit, sed victa Catoni." In the words 
 with which Juvalta closes his treatise: Liherum esse 
 hominem est necesse; vivere non est necesse. This once 
 recognised, we have an ethical doctrine that enables us 
 to judge of pohtical systems. For the morahst, States no 
 longer present themselves as mere competitive organisms 
 the value of which is perhaps to be determined by their 
 survival in evolution. It is not to be denied that the 
 judgment of the moralist may help to determine which 
 shall survive and which shall perish, or that the result 
 of historical evolution may ultimately coincide with 
 the moral judgment of mankind. This, however, does 
 not afEect the moral question itself. Even ultimately
 
 PREFACE Vll 
 
 successful iniquity would none the less be iniquity. If we 
 hold that wrong will not finally triumph, that belief springs 
 from a metaphysical conviction subsequent to our ethical 
 position, and on which this did not depend and can never 
 come to depend for its ethical validity. 
 
 " The primary and fundamental values of every moral 
 system," to adopt Mr Benn's statement of Professor 
 Juvalta's general position, are "Liberty and Justice." 
 These, I have always held, furnish the link between ethics 
 and politics. The only change of attitude I have to 
 indicate here is the definite recognition in them of an 
 ethically a priori element. From this point of view, I 
 am not in the least moved to scepticism by Mr Benn's 
 objection that "there are great systems of morality in 
 which neither liberty nor justice, as we understand them, 
 find a place. They might be sought for in vain in a 
 recent manifesto signed by the representatives of German 
 art, intellect and religion^." The reply may very well be, 
 in the words of Heraclitus, " One is ten thousand to me, 
 if he be the best." Kant outweighs them all; and we 
 know what his judgment would have been. The appeal 
 is not to general consent, but to reflective thought. In 
 the fight of this, there is no reason why we should call 
 such systems "systems of morality" at all. A code of 
 conduct adapted to promote efficiently the organic life 
 and expansion of an aggregate, but recognising no ultimate 
 ground save a Collective Will, never seemed to me to 
 
 ^ After writing this Preface, I heard with regret of the death of 
 Mr Benn (on the 16th of September, 1915). To avoid any misunder- 
 standing, I must add that I do not suppose Mr Benn disagreed with me 
 in personal opinion on the actual question: the difiference that I take to 
 be implied concerns the judgment we liave the right to pronounce as 
 moral philosophers.
 
 Vill PREFACE 
 
 deserve the name of morality in the proper sense. It 
 might easily be the code of a band of robbers. And, as a 
 matter of fact, a criminal State is not a new thing in 
 history. Its punishment also will not be a new thing. 
 Assyria at last became too intolerable for the ancient 
 East, as the Kingdom of Prussia may have become too 
 intolerable for the modern West. 
 
 Kant, as will be seen in Chapter VI of the present 
 Essay, has by anticipation discussed the actual case, and 
 has passed a somewhat lenient judgment. Briefly, it 
 amounts to this, that the other nations are entitled to 
 secure themselves henceforth by abolishing the institu- 
 tions of the military monarchy, but not by destroying 
 the offending State. Whatever may be thought of this 
 judgment, it will not be denied that it is remote enough 
 to be dispassionate. 
 
 T. W. 
 November 1915
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. Metaphysical Preliminaeies 
 
 II. Separation of Ethics from Metaphysics 
 
 III. End and Law in Ethics 
 
 IV. The History of Abstract Ethics 
 
 V. The Solution of Juvalta . 
 
 VI. Abstract and Concrete Ethics . 
 
 VII. Metaphysical Conclusion . 
 
 Index ..... 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 19 
 26 
 39 
 66 
 90 
 113 
 
 125
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES 
 
 "That the mind of man will ever once for all give up 
 metaphysical inquiries is as little to be expected as that 
 we shall sometime stop breathing altogether in order not 
 to be always breathing impure air." So true is this 
 assertion of Kant^ that, although I regard the ethical 
 thesis to be set forth as completely detachable from every 
 metaphysical doctrine, I find it desirable to begin by a 
 general statement of my metaphysical position in order 
 to leave no ambiguity as to any lurking assumptions in 
 the reasoning. For although ethics has to be constituted 
 as an independent doctrine, there are certain relations of 
 congruity between general positions regarding the founda- 
 tions of ethics and of metaphysics. A modification in 
 the traditionally empirical direction of English thought, 
 bringing it nearer to philosophical rationalism, is hkely to 
 be simultaneous in all the philosophical sciences, and not 
 limited to one. The modification of this kind which 
 I agree with others in thinking necessary in metaphysics 
 can be very briefly stated; and the statement of it will 
 have the advantage of showing that the modification 
 
 1 Prolegomena zu einerjeden. kunftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft 
 wird auftreten konnen, Anhang. 
 
 W. E. 1
 
 2 METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES [CH. 
 
 in ethics is not an incongruous patch, but organically 
 connected with a systematic readjustment. Further, at 
 the end of the present essay, I shall have to point out 
 that the ethical thesis suggests a certain metaphysical 
 conclusion. For this reason, even if there were no other, 
 a brief statement of metaphysical doctrine in so far as 
 it is undetermined by ethics must come at the beginning. 
 Thus it will be made clear exactly how the two philo- 
 sophical doctrines are interrelated. 
 
 The preliminary statement of metaphysical positions 
 can be limited to theory of knowledge. First, what is 
 the meaning of the propositions we make about existences ? 
 Philosophers agree in recognising the existence of minds 
 as apparent unities to which perceptions are referred, and 
 of the external world as an apparent order scientifically 
 calculable because it goes on in accordance with what is 
 called the "uniformity of nature." But what is the 
 method by which minds are to know about nature 
 and about themselves? The antithetic views are those 
 that have taken for their watchwords Keason and Ex- 
 perience. The philosophic Rationahst, if he is consistent, 
 denies the name of science to the collections of facts and 
 empirical generalisations which in the study of nature 
 precede deductions made from principles. Of course ex- 
 perience is not on this view neglected; it admittedly 
 furnishes the problems; and admittedly deductions from 
 principles are shown to be wrong if the experience to 
 which they refer does not confirm them. Still, reason 
 with its first principles is predominant; and the sciences 
 that have in them most of the matter of experience and 
 least of the form of reason are in the lowest place. 
 RatioDalism in this sense, in spite of differences of relative
 
 l] METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES 3 
 
 stress in the schools of antiquity as in later schools, may 
 be said to have predominated in the ancient classical 
 conception of science. A change that can only be called 
 revolutionary, both as regards the sciences of nature and 
 man, was brought into the notion of the general method 
 to be followed in seeking truth, by what has come to be 
 known as the Enghsh school of philosophy. The hne of 
 thinkers of which the great names are Bacon, Hobbes, 
 Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill and Spencer, placed a stress 
 on experience that had never been systematically placed 
 before^. The general position stated by Bacon was that 
 in all our investigations we must above all take care to 
 avoid importing the ideas of our own minds into nature. 
 Only if we set ourselves to determine by all devices what 
 happens in all circumstances may we hope at last to 
 arrive at the true law of events and so to rule nature by 
 obeying. A mark of "historical sense" in Bacon is that 
 he detected a certain resemblance as regards method 
 between the pre-Hellenic science of the ancient East, 
 with its empiricism and its apphcation to works of utihty, 
 and the aim that he was himself setting before the modern 
 world^. The formal logic and deductive mathematics 
 of the Greeks, which were the inspiration of their 
 
 1 By no one has this been more decisively accepted than by Comte, 
 who in theory of knowledge is to be classed wholly with the Experi- 
 entialists. This in part explains his especially powerful influence in 
 England. 
 
 2 Of. Comte, Systeme de Politique Positive, i. p. 429; "Quelque 
 eminent que soit enfin devenu I'esprit positif, il ne doit jamais oublier 
 qu'il 6mana partout de I'activit^ pratique, substituant graduellement 
 r etude des lois a celle des causes. Le principe universel de 1' invariability 
 des relations naturelles, sur iequel repose toute notre rationality, est une 
 acquisition essentiellement empirique." The principles themselves of 
 mathematics Comte held to be empirical in basis. 
 
 1—2
 
 4 METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES [CH. 
 
 philosophical rationalism, he was inclined to depreciate; 
 disagreeing in the latter point with the Continental 
 innovators who were his contemporaries. For, while 
 Descartes was quite at one with Bacon in depreciating 
 the logic of the mediaeval schools, with its basis in the 
 Aristotelian formal logic, his hope was especially in the 
 application of mathematical method. For the rest he 
 was far from ignoring experience; and his practical aims 
 had much in common with Bacon's, as may be seen 
 by looking into his prefaces. He and the other leading 
 Continental thinkers had also a perception that something 
 new was coming from Enghsh thought. Yet the funda- 
 mental difference remains. For Descartes as for his 
 great successors Spinoza and Leibniz, the test of truth is 
 finally clearness in the principles and evidence in the 
 reasonings. It was through the Enghsh mind that the 
 distinctive spirit of modern experimental science first 
 found expression in philosophy. 
 
 We are now, it seems to me, at the end of the period 
 characterised by this division as regards method. It has 
 several well-marked stages, of which the chief can easily 
 be passed in review. For theory of knowledge, con- 
 sidered by itself and no longer as a direct means of 
 approach to actual science, Locke's Essay concerning 
 Human Understanding first definitely set the method of 
 experiential, or "historical," inquiry into what we can 
 know, against Descartes' statement of rational principles 
 in the form of "innate ideas." The great importance 
 of this was that it fixed for the future the Enghsh 
 method of approach to philosophical problems through 
 psychology. Locke, however, partly misapprehended 
 Descartes' meaning; for Descartes did not suppose his
 
 l] METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES 5 
 
 "innate ideas" to be principles that were simply there 
 once for all and could be discovered by itself in every 
 human mind without trouble. It might sometimes 
 appear as if he meant this; but he said himself on 
 occasion that the innate ideas are only present potentially 
 and need experience to develop them ; and Leibniz, in 
 his Nouveaux Essais sur V Entendement Humain, expressly 
 defended the Cartesian rationalism in that sense while 
 making many concessions to Locke. The next important 
 phase on the rationahst side was when Kant again restated 
 the position, with new developments of the highest reach 
 philosophically, in relation to the deduction of the 
 ultimate consequences of experientialism by Hume on 
 the basis of Locke and Locke's successor Berkeley. Ever 
 since, the whole question of "theory of knowledge" has 
 centred in Kant. Kant's general position being that 
 certain rational principles, applied by the mind to ex- 
 perience, are necessary to constitute experience yet not 
 derivable from it, whence they are called in his terminology 
 a priori or "transcendental," these terms have since 
 attached themselves to the rationalist view in philosophy ; 
 all the older forms of that view having yielded to 
 Kantianism. For in fact Kant incorporated much from 
 the thinkers who represented the opposite direction. 
 His "transcendental" principles, he explained, though 
 not derivable from experience, have no proper application 
 beyond its limits. Thus the next great thinkers on the 
 experientialist side, Comte and Mill, always spoke of 
 him with respect, though their work was little affected by 
 him; and Spencer, with hardly any direct knowledge of 
 Kant, made spontaneous approaches to a theory of 
 knowledge which included a priori forms. At the same
 
 6 METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES [CH. 
 
 time, Kant's disciples or successors both in France 
 and in England succeeded in keeping the problems he 
 had raised well before the minds of philosophers. The 
 problems were never set at rest; and yet, somehow, we 
 find that we are in a new phase. The oppositions are 
 different. We are no longer distinctively Empiricists or 
 Rationalists, but perhaps (for the present) Intellectualists 
 or Vohtionahsts. And yet we are not very clear as to how 
 it has come about, or where exactly we stand as regards 
 the older controversies. For philosophy, which at least 
 aspires to be self-conscious, this is not a satisfactory state 
 of things. It seems desirable, if possible, that we should 
 know our own minds. As I am not acquainted with any 
 recent works that put the points more clearly than 
 Mr Bertrand Russell's smaller and larger volumes. The 
 Problems of Philosophy and Our Knowledge of the External 
 World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy, 
 I shall try to define my own positions in relation to his. 
 First, I perfectly agree that "Logical knowledge is 
 not derivable from experience alone, and the empiricist's 
 philosophy can therefore not be accepted in its entirety^. " 
 " There are propositions known a priori, and among them 
 are the propositions of logic and pure mathematics, as 
 well as the fundamental propositions of ethics^." Soon, 
 indeed, I come to a difference; and this is far-reaching, 
 being a subtlety that seems to mark the beginning of 
 divergence between the complete ideahsts and those who 
 remain in some sense reahsts. To develop the difference, 
 
 ^ Our Knowledge of the External World, p. 37. 
 
 ^ The Problems of Philosophy, p. 125. I give the end of the sentence 
 as well as the rest, though it is of course irrelevant at the present stage. 
 This also I myself accept, as will be seen later.
 
 l] METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES 7 
 
 however, will make clear the element of underlying 
 agreement: for it does not affect the ratio between the 
 factors of reason and experience in knowledge. 
 
 My most important difference on logic is that I regard 
 the laws of formal logic as laws of thought, not of things. 
 Here I follow Kant, who held them to be simply the 
 principles of "analytic judgments"; that is, judgments 
 that only make explicit what was before implicit, but do 
 not add new knowledge, like the "synthetic judgments" 
 {a priori or a posteriori) of mathematics and natural 
 science. Yet I quite agree with Mr Russell when he points 
 out that they are not psychological laws, that is, laws of 
 our actual thinking. "What is important," Mr Russell 
 says, "is not the fact that we think in accordance with 
 these laws, but the fact that things behave in accordance 
 with them, the fact that when we think in accordance 
 with them we think truly'^." "Thus the law of con- 
 tradiction is about things, and not merely about thoughts; 
 and although belief in the law of contradiction is a thought, 
 the law of contradiction itself is not a thought, but a fact 
 concerning the things in the world. If this, which we 
 beUeve when we believe the law of contradiction, were 
 not true of the things in the world, the fact that we were 
 compelled to think it true would not save the law of 
 contradiction from being false; and this shows that the 
 law is not a law of thought'^.'''' To this I reply that 
 certainly the law is not a law of thought merely as 
 intellection (to use a term suggested by Croom Robertson). 
 The establishment of the law belongs to metaphysics, 
 not to psychology. It is a law of valid thought, not of 
 
 1 The Problems of Philosophy, p. 113. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 138.
 
 8 METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES [CH. 
 
 thought as it is ascertained to take place. At the same 
 time it is a law of analytic thought merely, and can 
 reveal to us nothing that was not already contained in 
 some " synthetic judgment," a priori or a posteriori as the 
 case may be. If we have said that a thing momentarily 
 existed, we must not deny that it momentarily existed; 
 if we have said that it lasted such and such a time, 
 similarly we must not deny this; but by the mere law 
 of contradiction we cannot pass from the assertion of 
 momentary existence to the denial that the existence 
 was only for the moment. Yet, while it is not a law about 
 things, it may be called a law of valid thought about 
 things. What we need in order to make use of it is to 
 furnish ourselves with some true general assertion or 
 assertions of material import. Such assertions, I agree 
 with Mr Russell, are to be found in the fundamental 
 propositions of mathematics and in the law of causation. 
 These are, in Kantian language, "synthetic," not merely 
 "analytic." 
 
 Are they a priori, and, if so, in what sense? About 
 the distinctive mathematical judgments, on which the 
 existence of mathematics as a science depends, Kant's 
 answer, I hold, is right: they are synthetic judgments 
 a priori. Whatever may remain to be said about them 
 psychologically is subordinate and does not affect the 
 philosophical position, that their truth as laws is im- 
 mediately evident in the construction itself by which the 
 intellect brings them to hght. The method of estab- 
 lishing their validity is not, as in the natural sciences, 
 repetition of observations or experiments, but mental 
 constructions within the universal forms of perception, 
 viz., time and space. For their application to things,
 
 l] METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES 9 
 
 however, further general propositions are necessary. 
 Of these the most typical is the law of causation. 
 
 On the ground of pure experience Hume seemed to 
 have reduced the relation of cause and effect to an 
 ultimately irrational expectation that the future will 
 resemble the past. Hume himself of course beheved in 
 natural causation as firmly as any one; witness his 
 classical statement of determinism ahke for mind and 
 things, and more especially his "Essay on IVIiracles.'* 
 Kant therefore quite rightly treated his sceptical result 
 as a question, not a solution. His answer in general 
 terms is that anything we can call "nature" or "ex- 
 perience" would not be possible without a certain con- 
 stitution of mind not derived from experience. Given 
 experiential data, and sequences of events among them, 
 we "make" a particular sequence, which presents itself 
 at first as mere sequence, "necessary," by adding some- 
 thing from the mind. That is to say, we impose the 
 relation of cause and effect on mere "subjective" data of 
 sense; and thus for what would otherwise be no more 
 than a play of dreaming phantasy we substitute a system 
 that can be called in the proper sense nature as the object 
 of science. 
 
 The unsatisfactory point in this answer was that it 
 seemed to make the relation arbitrary in a way in which 
 it obviously is not. We cannot help thinking of relations 
 of cause and effect as "given" in the sense that the mind 
 has to find them out and conform to them. Is this 
 reconcilable with the vaHdity of Kant's answer, that the 
 relation of cause and effect is a "category" of the mind 
 imposed on the sensible data? Difficult as the recon- 
 cihation may seem at first sight, I think it can be attained
 
 10 METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES [CH. 
 
 by a further evacuation of the a priori forms of Kant, — 
 but an evacuation that is not destruction. 
 
 We must not suppose the mind equipped with a set 
 of ready-made forms which it imposes on the flux of 
 feehng. It is not true that we make a particular sequence, 
 which is at first mere sequence, necessary by imposing 
 a "category of the understanding," and thus constitute 
 a particular relation of a cause to an effect. But also, 
 it is not true that the order of perception simply as given 
 imposes the relation of cause and effect on the mind. 
 In rational science, the movement of thought is this. 
 The mind, having formed an ideal of knowledge by exercise 
 in logic and mathematics — which need not have gone 
 very far — seeks to impose its own ideal of necessary 
 connexion on that which it finds in perception. Already 
 in perception certain uniformities have been established 
 empirically which suggest the possibility of reahsing this 
 ideal ; but most perception goes on without any apparent 
 stringency of connexion, as if things could simply come 
 into and go out of existence, or as if, in Hume's phrase, 
 anything could cause anything. To make a truly 
 "objective" nature, as Kant said, the mind has to import 
 something. What it does is to assert, and then to seek 
 for, relations analogous to those of logical and mathe- 
 matical necessity. For the logician, the "consequent" 
 in a hypothetical argument necessarily follows from the 
 "ground." Then in nature one event must follow from 
 another with similar rigorous necessity. And in fact, 
 not by applying ready-made forms that we have tabu- 
 lated, but by persistently trying, with a generahsed ideal 
 of necessity in the mind, it is found that nature can 
 more and more be interpreted as a system of necessary
 
 ij METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES 11 
 
 relations. From mere subjective flux of perception, it 
 becomes "experience" in Kant's sense. We at length 
 find laws that are not mere rules, but theorems admitting 
 of no exception, as if nature were logic and mathematics 
 realised, to be the only kind of laws according to which 
 experience can be coherently thought. 
 
 But is not the test, it may be said from the ex- 
 perientialist side, simply verification by perception? We 
 begin with observation, we proceed by thought and 
 experiment, and finally we appeal to what we find actually 
 goes on. The reply is that this is true in all particular 
 cases ; but that if we take into our view the whole activity 
 of science at any time, the verification is never complete; 
 and yet we know that we shall always hold to our ideal 
 of necessary connexion against any appearance of un- 
 certainty or caprice. This is the inexpugnable element of 
 philosophical rationalism involved in the scientific view 
 of nature. However evacuated the element of the 
 a priori becomes, it cannot be effaced. 
 
 The complementary truth enforced by experientialism 
 is that only on the condition of attending to things and 
 events and adapting its behaviour to them in the minutest 
 detail, suppressing every disposition to dictate what the 
 particular connexions must be, can the mind ever come to 
 understand them. 
 
 But what ultimately are these things and events in 
 nature? Here the answers of philosophers seem to have 
 depended little on the degree in which their theory 
 of knowledge was experiential or rationalist. Kant's 
 general answer did not differ from that of the English; 
 that the sciences of nature deal with phenomena, that 
 is to say, appearances for minds. Yet, though none but
 
 12 METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES [CH. 
 
 this "idealist" view was consistent Avith his positions, he 
 took fright at the term when it was applied to him, thinking 
 he was being accused of the absurdities popularly at- 
 tributed to Berkeley. Of Berkeley it is clear from his 
 references that he had no knowledge whatever; and of 
 Hume, while he knew and had carefully studied the 
 Inquiry and the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, it 
 is evident that he had not read the more radically 
 sceptical Treatise of Human Nature. Thus the Critique 
 of Pure Reason did not start at all points from the most 
 advanced critical positions already attained; and in the 
 second edition, through fear of having his " Transcendental 
 ideahsm" classed with the ideahsm of Berkeley, he 
 introduced new complication and obscurity into a work 
 already sufficiently difficult; bringing back apparently 
 the confused notion of a material object that is ultimately 
 non-phenomenal. In reality this, as a clear-headed 
 successor like Schopenhauer saw, is as inconsistent with 
 the Kantian criticism of knowledge as Berkeley had 
 already shown it to be with the subjectively critical point 
 of view common to Descartes and Locke. 
 
 When I speak of the confused notion of a non- 
 phenomenal material object, I do not mean the "thing- 
 in-itself" or "things-in-themselves." This, whether we 
 continue to use the term or not, was quite soundly dis- 
 tinguished from phenomena. It meant properly meta- 
 physical reality, of which the phenomena are the mani- 
 festation. Kant's expressions about the thing-in-itself 
 are not entirely consistent; but the view to which he 
 points most distinctly is that reality is a timeless system 
 of ideas, which might be known, if a speculative meta- 
 physic were possible, under the form of a Platonic
 
 l] METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES 13 
 
 Intelligible World, but is actually most comprehensible as 
 a system of ethical and aesthetic norms. For Hegel, 
 reaUty was Thought, knowable in the actual world and 
 manifested above all in history. For Schopenhauer it 
 was Will, temporarily individualised in conscious beings. 
 For Berkeley it was a system of spirits communicating 
 by ideas (which are groupings of sense-elements), held in 
 unity by a supreme personal spirit, which determines 
 the sequence of ideas so that communication is possible 
 in a common world of which, and of its parts, the being is 
 to be perceived (esse is percipi). For Hume, if he had 
 put his result in a dogmatic form, it would have been 
 particular impressions (mental states) composing a flux 
 in which individual personalities are temporary appear- 
 ances of unification. All these ontological views, clearly, 
 are consistent with ideahsm in the phenomenist sense; 
 which of course does not in the least deny that what we 
 call the external world indicates a reality, but denies 
 that it is itself, in its appearance as objects and events 
 in space and time, the reality from which minds can be 
 explained. On this side of the doctrine, no one has ever 
 refuted Berkeley. 
 
 The Berkeleyan ideahsm illustrates an interesting 
 remark of Mr Russell, that the most hopeful thing for 
 progress in any philosophical system is the element 
 inexplicable on its own principles. Idealism of rationalist 
 type, in the schools of antiquity descended from Plato, 
 had shown quite effectively that mental processes cannot 
 be explained from material processes in the organism. 
 The phenomenist view of material things had also been 
 attained as a doctrine. Berkeley, however, discovered, 
 from the experientialist position of a disciple of Locke,
 
 14 METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES [CH. 
 
 a much more generally apprehensible way of proving the 
 truth of the doctrine, now again emerging in modern 
 philosophy. He proved it by means of the "surd" 
 in ancient and modern materialism. According to 
 Democritus, the reahty is that which we know by touch. 
 The atom, which ultimately resists effort, is "being"; 
 void, which does not resist, but lets the atoms go through 
 it, is a kind of real "not-being." QuaHties such as sound, 
 colour, and so forth, exist only "by convention"; that 
 is, we talk about them as if they were really in things, 
 but they are not. Modern physicists, when the time was 
 ripe for the scientific application of atomism, carried 
 forward this Democritean view. The ultimate realities, 
 in their conception of the world, were resistant and 
 extended particles like the atoms of Democritus. By 
 the real motions of these real particles certain ideas of 
 qualities — sound, colour, heat, now called "secondary 
 qualities " as distinguished from the primary quahties of 
 resistance and extension — are raised in us. These exist 
 only in us, not in things, the reality of which is simply 
 to be groups of variously agitated particles. Thus the 
 "surd" remained; for clearly no explanation had been 
 given of the "secondary quahties." You do not expel 
 sensations from the world by calling them "conven- 
 tional" or saying they only exist in us. Berkeley, in his 
 fresh polemic against materialism, turned the accepted 
 doctrines of the physicists against themselves; showed 
 that the sensations on the ground of which we affirm the 
 primary quahties are just as much in our minds as the 
 others; that all ahke, indeed, are as much "in us" as 
 those typical examples of pure "subjectivity," pleasure 
 and pain ; finally, that of material substance, in distinction
 
 l] METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES 15 
 
 from groupings of perceptions, we neither know nor can 
 conceive or imagine anything. This does not mean that 
 the world with the things in it is unreal : on the contrary, 
 all alike in the world is real, in the only sense in which 
 it can be, as a constant order in our perceptions. 
 
 From this constant order we are entitled rationally 
 to infer the existence of minds other than our own; 
 simply because we perceive groupings of phenomena 
 resembling our own organism, with which particular 
 group of phenomena our own consciousness is associated 
 in a peculiar way. Thus the common objection is met 
 that the Berkeleyan idealism leads to "solipsism"; that 
 is, to the assertion by an individual mind that it is the 
 only real existence, other persons having no existence 
 beyond their appearances. It is rationally met, that is 
 to say; for I do not suppose that we actually come to 
 beheve in the existence of other persons by any such 
 inference. The question for the philosopher, however, is, 
 what we are entitled to believe, not, how we come to 
 believe it. We believe many things on instinct to which 
 the test of science or philosophy is applied with varying 
 results. The Berkeleyan ideahst finds that the ana- 
 logical argument to other persons is both sound in itself 
 and leads to an intelHgible conclusion ; whereas the 
 notion of material substance, if analysed, leaves no 
 residue that is non-phenomenal. Here, we may say, 
 there is left only a confused notion vaguely pointing to 
 metaphysics^, but incapable of any properly scientific 
 
 ^ This is slightly to supplement Berkeley, who, at least in his first 
 phase, did not concede so much as this. Kant, on the other hand, 
 did not become quite clear of supposing that this notion can be something 
 for science; which, on that view, would have an "object" that is neither 
 pure phenomenon nor "thing-in-itself."
 
 16 METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES [CH. 
 
 statement; for science has to do only with pheno- 
 mena. 
 
 I do not know whether Mr Russell will find that this 
 meets his objections to idealism; but he has some 
 positive arguments for realism not yet touched upon. 
 With the portion of these that concerns the mathematical 
 infinite I shall try to deal. If this is knowable as a 
 "thing," and not merely as an "idea," then ideahsm as 
 I understand it must be abandoned. Now my knowledge 
 of mathematics is undoubtedly very small in comparison 
 with Mr Russell's; but the question of philosophical 
 principle seems to me to come near the beginning and 
 to concern the elements of the subject; and so I venture 
 to discuss it. I find no mystery in Mr Russell's ex- 
 positions, such as Berkeley found in those of contemporary 
 "analysts." They are to me quite intelhgible, but all 
 quite exphcable on the principles of ideahsm without 
 supposing infinite numbers to be real collections. The 
 true mode of explaining the infinite in mathematics 
 I seem to myself to have found in De Morgan and 
 Renouvier, one a philosophical mathematician, the other 
 a philosopher with a considerable knowledge of mathe- 
 matics. What I have learnt from them I shall now try 
 to apply to infinite numbers. I take it to be merely 
 historical accident that the thinkers competent by special 
 knowledge to expound the more recent developments 
 in pure mathematics are realists. Their special know- 
 ledge has enabled them to display a subtlety in defending 
 their reahsm which, it seems to me, is unnecessary for 
 the defence of ideahsm. The "short way" that I propose 
 from the ideahst point of view is this. There is no need 
 to contest what is said about the orders of infinite
 
 l] METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES 17 
 
 numbers, and their relations to one another of greater 
 and less, paradoxical as these are. The "number of all 
 finite numbers," for example, is greater than the "number 
 of all finite squares"; and yet both are infinite, for 
 neither can be counted^. Since they cannot be thought 
 as results of counting, they are unthinkable as actual 
 collections; but the difficulty disappears if we regard 
 "infinite numbers" as names for certain processes in 
 mind that can be carried on indefinitely with application 
 to (phenomenal) objects, according to a certain law of 
 counting, different in different cases. We can make as 
 many terms as we hke, and can apply them to objects 
 or parts of objects, but there is not an actually existent 
 infinite series of terms. The infinite series of fractions 
 less than P is really what Renouvier called an "indefinite 
 possibility" of dividing. We can make as many as we 
 like, and can go on applying them without limit to a 
 "continuous" magnitude, but there is not an infinite 
 series of actually existent fractions. To speak as if there 
 were is scientific shorthand for describing a continuous 
 quantity. So I can attach a meaning to calhng the 
 number of all fim'te numbers and the number of all finite 
 
 1 Our Knowledge of the External World, pp. 194-195 (comment on 
 a passage from Galileo's Mathematical Discourses). "It is actually the 
 case that the number of square (finite) numbers is the same as the 
 number of (finite) numbers.... But although the infinite numbers which 
 Galileo discusses are equal, Cantor has shown that what Simplicius 
 [a personage in the Dialogue] could not conceive is true, namely, thr.t 
 there are an infinite number of different infinite numbers, and that the 
 conception of greater and less can be perfectly well applied to them. 
 The whole of Simplicius's difficulty comes, as is evident, from his belief 
 that, if greater and less can be applied, a part of an infinite collection 
 must have fewer terms than the whole ; and when this is denied, all 
 contradictions disappear." 
 
 2 Ibid., pp. 178-179. 
 
 w. E. 2
 
 18 METAPHYSICAL PRELIMINARIES [CH. I 
 
 squares equally infinite numbers though the first is 
 greater than the second, only if this is taken as scientific 
 shorthand (not to say "useful nonsense"). When they 
 are brought under the conditions of thought, I find no 
 puzzle. The infinity of both series ahke means that you 
 can carry both beyond any assignable number of terms. 
 That the first is greater than the second means that, 
 wherever you stop, the whole is greater than its part. 
 If you do not stop, there is no whole. 
 
 Thus, so far as I can see, there is nothing in the 
 mathematical theory of the infinite which, when clearly 
 conceived, requires us to suppose collections of real things 
 that do not comply with the conditions of phenomenal 
 presentation. Whether in its a priori or a posteriori 
 elements, science is alike phenomenal. On this side the 
 admission of a certain element of metaphysical Rationahsm 
 makes no difference to English Idealism as theory of 
 knowledge. It is true that pure phenomenism is in- 
 sufficient for philosophy ; that we need a theory of being 
 as well as of appearance ; but, as has been briefly indicated, 
 there are many possible idealistic ontologies. This is all 
 that was necessary in an introduction to an essay of 
 which the direct object is not metaphysical. Indeed I 
 must next point out that the principles of ethics not only 
 do not depend on any of the possible ontological doctrines, 
 but do not even depend on the generalised theory of 
 knowledge to which I have almost exclusively hmited 
 myself.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 SEPARATION OF ETHICS FROM METAPHYSICS 
 
 The classical statement of the separation of ethics 
 from metaphysics is that of Hume's Treatise^, where he 
 objects to systems of morahty in general that they proceed 
 as if ought or ought not can follow immediately, without 
 the introduction of any new principle, from is or is not. 
 This appUes historically both to systems called natural- 
 istic and to those called rationalistic; though, as Pro- 
 fessor Carveth Read has observed^, not to all. Of those 
 to which it does not apply, the systems that may be most 
 conveniently singled out are those of Aristotle and Kant ; 
 for, on the next question of general principle to be dis- 
 cussed, these are antithetic. Both are very complex and 
 in their own manner include everything; but Aristotle's 
 system is directed by the idea of moral end, Kant's by 
 that of moral law. Neither, of course, is without meta- 
 physical points of contact, but essentially they are both 
 free from the fallacy of trying to deduce what is to be done 
 by man from the mere nature of some reality. Aristotle 
 holds that in attaining the highest good, which is con- 
 templative thought, man is so far imitating the life of 
 
 ^ Book III, Part i, sect. 1. 
 
 ' Natural and Social Morals, p. 6. 
 
 2—2
 
 20 SEPARATION OF ETHICS [CH. 
 
 God ; but he would still regard thought as man's highest 
 good even if it were simply a good for man, and not (as 
 he holds that it is) realised perpetually in Mind that 
 thinks only itself. Kant, in the Practical Reason, contends 
 for an affirmation that the universe is so ruled as to join 
 happiness to man's observance of the moral law; but he 
 holds that law to be completely obhgatory for man 
 whatever the constitution of the universe may be. This 
 is to be clear of the fallacy pointed out by Hume, as 
 neither Platonism nor Stoicism is clear of it. No doubt 
 in both these cases the ethical teaching of the school 
 admits of a statement to which logical objection could 
 not be taken ; but, in so far as it is professedly deduced 
 from the theoretical doctrine, the logical objection is fatal. 
 To determine the order of goods from the scale of beings 
 according to the degree in which these are "real" is a 
 most typical expression of the "metaphysical fallacy"; 
 as the precept to "live according to nature" is a direct 
 expression of the "naturalistic fallacy," which is merely 
 another form of the first. 
 
 The writer who has tracked down these fallacies most 
 eSectively is Mr G. E. Moore in Principia Ethica. I do 
 not propose to go over the ground again, but will briefly 
 note on my own account that any speculative conclusions 
 arrived at or suggested as possible in the preceding 
 chapter do nothing at all to give us a starting-point in 
 ethics. That reahty is to be expressed in terms of mind 
 tells us nothing in relation to conduct that is not already 
 obvious. For it is obvious that the existence of ethics 
 depends on the existence of minds in some sense; but 
 whether these are temporary or permanent existences, 
 existences not referable to anything non-mental as their
 
 Il] FROM METAPHYSICS 21 
 
 cause or simply determinations (if this were intelligible) of 
 material things, makes no difference to the ethical ques- 
 tion, how shall minds regulate their conduct in so far as 
 it is in their power to regulate it. Science and meta- 
 physics can tell us, or assume to tell us, much about our 
 power and its limits and about the nature of the things 
 among which we are placed ; but the question for ethics 
 concerns our choice when there is a choice, and this 
 supposes that actually something is at present undeter- 
 mined, that is, not yet realised, not yet part of anything 
 that is there whether we will it or not. In asserting this 
 "apparent freedom of choice," which is all that is re- 
 quired, we are not asserting anything metaphysical, but 
 a mere datum like the existence of our thoughts and 
 feelings and of certain objects that may or may not be 
 more than groupings of phenomena. Thus, for the 
 purpose of ethical inquiry, we may place ourselves in the 
 beginning simply at the common-sense point of view, 
 assuming nothing but minds (temporary or permanent) 
 among objects (temporary or permanent) able to act 
 (whatever this may ultimately mean) upon objects and, 
 through objects, upon each other. The more we know 
 about fact or reality, whether scientifically or meta- 
 physically, the more conditions of choice there will be; 
 but the essence of the choice must always depend on 
 what we think we ought to do so far as the fact is not 
 already determined apart from us; for if it is so deter- 
 mined we have no choice. Even then, to acquiesce in 
 not having a choice is a kind of action of our own, to 
 which the term ought or ought not may be applicable. 
 And ought or ought not, here too, is not deducible from the 
 bare fact.
 
 22 SEPARATION OF ETHICS [CH. 
 
 Perhaps an even more distinctive part of Mr Moore's 
 work than his refutation of the naturalistic and meta- 
 physical fallacies is his refutation of Hedonism as usually 
 understood. Here he depends much for starting-points 
 on the Philebus of Plato, to which it will always be 
 necessary to go back when any subtlety is aimed at in 
 the discussion of pleasure in its relation to ends considered 
 as desirable. That pleasure is actually aimed at, Mr 
 Moore elaborately shows on the model of his preceding 
 discussions, does not prove that it ought to be aimed at. 
 What he himself is in search of is a scale of goods or values 
 arranged, we might put it, in the order of their objective 
 preferableness. Of course all moral philosophers aim at 
 objectivity in the sense of universahty. The naturalistic 
 and metaphysical fallacies arose from the search for 
 something general to place above the mere temporary 
 choice of the will. For some who had seen through these, 
 hedonism seemed to have fixed on something of the kind, 
 because pleasure and absence of pain were apparently 
 identical with universally preferable feeling. But is the 
 preferableness of a total state identical with its pre- 
 ferableness when compared with other states simply as 
 regards the quantity of pleasure^ it includes? Plato, 
 merely by submitting the question in the concrete to 
 intuitive judgment, showed that it is not. He made it 
 perfectly clear on the one side that, ready as we may be 
 to allow that knowledge is a good, we should not desire 
 a perpetual state of the completest and most conscious 
 knowledge (if it could exist) without a trace of pleasurable 
 
 ^ This is put for simplicity. Mr Moore has gone through all the 
 complexities that come into view when pleasure and pain are considered 
 as present or absent or in various degrees coexistent.
 
 Il] FROM METAPHYSICS 23 
 
 feeling. On the other side, we should not desire the 
 perpetuity of a state in which we were steeped in pleasure 
 without consciousness of any intellectual relation, a state 
 in which we knew nothing for ever but were all feeling, 
 like a beatified oyster. Thus the problem of the de- 
 sirable life has to be solved by determining a certain 
 mixture in which both knowledge and pleasure shall have 
 their part. Starting thence, Mr Moore has followed up 
 the problem with extreme subtlety, and with results 
 which seem to me on the whole sound. In the study of 
 his results I have myself arrived at an additional hedonic 
 paradox. 
 
 The element of truth in hedonism, I hold, as I have 
 consistently held, is that unless there goes wdth it some 
 subjective accompaniment of feehng which is regarded 
 as preferable to other feehngs, no state or process can be 
 itself an object of preference^. It is understood of course 
 that we are speaking of preference by self-conscious or 
 reflective thought. Mr Moore, a Httle more doubtfully, 
 decides in the same sense; but the contention that 
 interests him most is that "intrinsic value" is not pro- 
 portional to pleasure. In a different way I have allowed 
 this by definitely rejecting Bentham's notion of happiness 
 as consisting of an algebraical sum of pleasures and 
 pains ; pleasures counting as positive and pains as negative 
 quantities. Happiness, I argued, is a total state of the 
 personahty not even in theory to be estimated by any 
 calculus, because it is not definable in hedonic terms 
 through and through^. Mr Moore, when that was written, 
 
 1 I still adhere to the expression of this in a review of Professor 
 Sorley's Ethics of Naturalism (1st ed.). Mind, O.S. xi. 265 (April, 1880). 
 
 2 The Liberal State (1907), p. 25.
 
 24 SEPARATION OF ETHICS [CH. 
 
 had already worked out the theory of hedonism and the 
 objections to it with far more exactitude. His general 
 position is finally that we can add to the intrinsic value 
 (the preferableness) of a total state by adding something 
 that is not pleasure; consequently, pleasure will not 
 serve by itself to test the ends of action. Moreover, 
 total value may be greatly increased by adding something 
 which by itself has little or no value, or even negative 
 value. The subject of intrinsic value will recur later: 
 in the meantime I state my own paradox, which I have 
 not found anticipated either in Principia Eihica or in 
 the smaller Ethics^. 
 
 Let us suppose a universe without either pleasure or 
 pain : such a universe would be made better by intro- 
 ducing some pain and no positive pleasure. For in the 
 former universe there could be no preferred subjective 
 state and therefore no end and no good; while in the 
 latter tranquillity would be a desired state, an end and 
 a good. This is in fact the world as Plato in one of his 
 hedonic speculations supposed it to be, and as it was 
 afterwards supposed to be by Epicurus; what we call 
 pleasures being held to consist only in release from pain. 
 Such a world, I contend, if there are means of overcoming 
 the pain and attaining intervals of the desired tranquillity, 
 is better than that for which we have supposed it sub- 
 stituted. 
 
 I do not myself regard this as the actual constitution 
 of our world, but recognise the existence of positive 
 pleasures. These are a part of the ends of action, and 
 the consideration of them helps us to classify some goods ; 
 though the "hedonical calculus" certainly will not enable 
 ^ A passage in Ethics, p. 244, is on the verge of it.
 
 Il] FROM METAPHYSICS 25 
 
 US to fix our larger preferences. But if out of these 
 preferences we are to construct an ethical doctrine, there 
 must necessarily be some attempt to reach the kind of 
 agreement that the hedonists prematurely thought to 
 be attained or attainable. Such an attempt, however 
 often it may fail, does not seem in itself chimerical. 
 Preferences have changed historically, partly through 
 argument. Ideal goods have become more distinctly 
 conceived; and there is an art of persuasion by which 
 they may be brought under common points of view that 
 will determine their rank in opinion. There is also some 
 spontaneous convergence. Mr Moore's estimate of the 
 things that have most intrinsic value differs httle from 
 Comte's final estimate, and seems to have been arrived 
 at independently. Among intrinsic goods, he puts in the 
 highest place aesthetic enjoyments and personal affections, 
 with knowledge in the third place and subordinated to 
 the first. Professor Carveth Read, following Aristotle 
 and Spinoza in making philosophy the highest good, 
 takes a view less unhke the preceding than might at 
 first appear; for philosophy, thus conceived, is of course 
 not any kind of mere special knowledge, but includes as 
 elements beauty and "intellectual love." And the highest 
 good does not mean the sole and exclusive good. 
 
 But in the end, whatever further agreement may be 
 reached through discussion and arts of persuasion, have 
 we arrived at anything that can be called ethics proper? 
 Or are we still, as Mr Moore imphes in the claim he makes 
 for his Principia Ethica, only at the stage of prolegomena ? 
 In my opinion, we are only at that stage. The most 
 distinctive part of ethics has not yet come into view.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 END AND LAW IN ETHICS 
 
 So far, it has been assumed that the end of action is 
 a good to be pursued; and this in general terms is in- 
 contestable. Without some good in view as a conscious 
 end, there would be no rational as distinguished from 
 instinctive action. Ethics is of course concerned properly 
 with rational action; that is, with conduct directed by 
 some general conception to which it is held that particular 
 actions ought to conform. But what is the meaning of 
 this word oughf^. Does it merely mean that, given a 
 certain end, the way of reaching it pointed out by the 
 law of causation must be adopted if we do not wish to 
 miss it? Or does the word apply also to the end; so 
 that it can be said we ought to choose such and such 
 a good? And if we choose the wrong end or take the 
 wrong way to the right end, what is to be said? Are 
 we simply unwise, either through want of sufficient 
 knowledge or of consistency with ourselves, or through 
 not having been rightly persuaded about the value of one 
 good in distinction from another? Or is there the 
 possibiUty that we are wrong in a sense that does not 
 mean exactly the same as unwise? 
 
 Some would say that there is nothing in the case but
 
 CH. Ill] END AND LAW IN ETHICS 27 
 
 unwisdom, perhaps in extreme cases a mental infirmity 
 analogous to disease. The function of the moral philoso- 
 pher is to make the relative value of goods an object of 
 clear knowledge. The educator and the practical moralist, 
 trained in the philosophical schools, must apply arts of 
 persuasion in order to impress the true system on the 
 general mind. In extreme cases of missing the good, the 
 State may apply remedies in the form of penalties; 
 partly for the sake of others, because they are liable to 
 suffer injury, and penalties inflicted deter those who 
 might imitate the actions of the offender; and partly in 
 order to cure the offender himself, whose welfare is for 
 its own sake an object of interest to other members of 
 the community. 
 
 But already in this view we find implicitly a principle 
 more expressly formulated by morahsts who find the idea 
 not simply of unwisdom but of moral wrong in a more 
 distinctive sense in certain modes of pursuing ends. In 
 the view just stated, it is to be observed that the morahst, 
 theoretical or practical, the educator, and the legislator, 
 are all supposed to be actuated by motives of general 
 benevolence. Now many of the moralists known as 
 Utihtarians find the idea of rightdoing in action according 
 to the principle of general benevolence or "altruism," 
 that is, in seeking the good of others or of all, and the 
 idea of wrongdoing in aiming exclusively at one's own 
 good to the disadvantage of others or in indifference to 
 them. 
 
 This at first sight comes nearer to the notion con- 
 veyed by Ethics. Morality in the popular view is not 
 identified with prudence or with intellectual consistency. 
 In the system that attempts this identification, it would
 
 28 END AND LAW IN ETHICS [CH. 
 
 seem to an outsider that the moral interests of life are 
 represented more especially by the philosophers, educators 
 and legislators. And a modern utilitarian might very 
 plausibly argue that that is because the principle of 
 general benevolence is represented most in them. They 
 aim at the good of all spontaneously. The rest of the 
 community they treat as their charges, to be disciplined 
 into right for their own good by having the appropriate 
 trains of associated ideas set gomg in their minds. For 
 the existence of morahty, then, we must suppose spon- 
 taneous altruism somewhere. This is the true spring of 
 it all. 
 
 When we come to the application, however, difficulties 
 soon arise. There seems to be a more definite and 
 stringent meaning of right and wrong than has hitherto 
 come into view. This meaning does not depend simply 
 on the contrast between egoism and altruism. It may be 
 made to appear as if it did by using the " question-begging 
 epithets," as Bentham might have called them, of 
 "selfish" and "unselfish," and then asserting that selfish- 
 ness is always wrong and unselfishness always right. As 
 a matter of fact, there is every kind of complication. 
 Self-assertion may be in some circumstances a right and 
 a duty; self-sacrifice may be wrong. If there are "in- 
 trinsic values," these must be known to be such for 
 ourselves before we can seek them for others; so that 
 egoism cannot even in the ideal be extruded from human 
 life. And, when we have our scheme of values, are we 
 to sacrifice for ourselves a value that we regard as elevated 
 in order to procure for others something we regard as 
 contemptible? Nothing could be more unselfish, but 
 many moralists would think it wrong. Let us suppose
 
 ni] END AND LAW IN ETHICS 29 
 
 that a few persons in a community desire freedom while 
 the majority would be more comfortable in slavery and 
 know that they would be. The few, on the other hand, 
 who desire freedom, know that they are at least strong 
 enough, if they choose, to make acquiescence too un- 
 comfortable for the rest. Much misery, however, will 
 be caused in the struggle. Shall they "unselfishly" 
 submit in order to avoid this and to give the majority 
 the Idnd of happiness they desire and can understand? 
 Milton, at least, who was a morahst, would have despised 
 the decision in such a case to comply with the desires of 
 those who love more " bondage with ease than strenuous 
 liberty." 
 
 This illustration brings into view the ethical doctrine 
 which in modern times has been set against all the forms 
 of that which has been hitherto considered. What we 
 have to determine primarily, it is said, is not the good 
 that is to be the end of action, whether it is a good for 
 one or for all, whether it is to be pursued selfishly or 
 unselfishly, but the moral law to which actions ought to 
 conform. This moral law is not a deduction from any 
 end, but is vahd simply as law. Its form is that of 
 reciprocal relations of right and duty. The general 
 expression for it is justice, to which actions prompted by 
 egoistic and altruistic motives are ahke under the obhgation 
 of submitting. This obligation is not imposed by any 
 external command, whether of a human or superhuman 
 legislator, but by the rational will of the individual 
 person, who imposes the law upon himself. The person 
 is "autonomous." At the same time the legislation is 
 universal, being apphcable to all rational beings alike 
 under the same conditions. And this stringent obhgation,
 
 30 END AND LAW IN ETHICS [CH. 
 
 some have contended, is precisely that which protects 
 human liberty from possible suppression by the benevolent 
 utilitarianism which, under sanctions of persuasion or of 
 force, would seek to promote good or happiness directly 
 by authoritative systems of educative and of poUtical 
 institutions. 
 
 A utiHtarian who values liberty might reply: I 
 accept precisely what you call the law of justice, but as 
 a means to the kind of community — a community of 
 freemen — which to me is the end. This reply, however, 
 when closely considered, seems to be pohtical rather than 
 properly ethical. No doubt if a community prefers or 
 can be persuaded to prefer hberty, it will, if it desires to 
 survive, adopt the means to that end. But what is there, 
 ethically, to distinguish the taste of a number of persons 
 who prefer hberty from the taste of a number of other 
 persons who prefer despotism ? Only a doctrine like that 
 of the moral law regarded as supreme over all ends, its 
 adherents finally insist, can determine the question of 
 right. 
 
 And the appeal of the doctrine is two-sided. If it is 
 held to be the only firm ground of political liberty, a 
 powerful appeal is also made to the conservative mind 
 when the idea of supreme moral law is found to go back 
 to the hoariest antiquity. The unwritten and eternal 
 laws associated \\^th divinity in the famous passages of 
 Sophocles — the speech of Antigone to Creon^ and the 
 chorus in the Oedipus Tyrannus^ — are not appealed to 
 as new but as immemorial. In Aeschylus, justice is the 
 appanage of the elder gods or of impersonal Fate, whose 
 
 1 Ant. 450-470. « Oed. T. 863-871.
 
 Ill] END AND LAW IN ETHICS 31 
 
 inviolable Right will bring the new Powers that have 
 set themselves against it to their doom. 
 
 Yet, old as is this generalised assertion of moral law, 
 it was never, in the explicit systems of Greek philosophy, 
 made ostensibly the directing principle. This was always 
 the idea of end, in subordination to which the moral 
 virtues were classified as aptitudes for attaining it. 
 Justice, however, where if anywhere the idea of law 
 prevails, was always regarded as the chief social virtue ; 
 and Aristotle, it has been noticed, does not derive it 
 immediately from the end, but from quasi-mathematical 
 notions. In modern times, on the other hand, while the 
 same precedence has not always been accorded to justice, 
 the idea of moral law has at length come to be formulated 
 in the way .that we have seen. The first to receive poetic 
 it has been the last to receive scientific expression. 
 
 But is there not, some may ask, a universally vahd 
 norm in the idea of end or good ? Mr Moore proposes a 
 way that seems in theory to get rid not only of all diflSi- 
 culties about egoism and altruism, but of all conflict 
 between moral law and end, by declaring the right action 
 to be always that of which in the long run the consequences 
 are the greatest total good in the universe. As good is 
 the objectively preferable, the greatest total of good in 
 the universe is theoretically capable of being known. 
 And, as I must treat myself impartially simply as one 
 element in the total, there can never be any question 
 whether I ought to be egoistic or altruistic: my duty to 
 myself and others is simply the distribution that will 
 give the greatest total good. My right, clearly, is coex- 
 tensive with my duty. I ought to have precisely the 
 share of good that it is my duty to assign to myself.
 
 32 END AND LAW IN ETHICS [CH. 
 
 Against this, there are two arguments. First, we are 
 not omniscient beings, as we should have to be to know 
 the total consequences of an action. These are knowable 
 only in the sense that knowledge of them by omniscience 
 is conceivable. From this it follows that we can never 
 know what is right. But in fact we know that in most 
 cases we do know what is right. Therefore, to know 
 what is right it is not necessary to know the total con- 
 sequences of an action. Secondly, suppose a being who 
 knows all and determines what shall be. Then, from the 
 point of view of the ethics of law, since the universe 
 includes persons, its total good cannot be determined 
 apart from ultimately just relations among persons. The 
 law therefore even in the mind of omniscience is not 
 wholly derivative from an end that does not include it. 
 This reply is conclusive at the present stage, because to 
 reject a type of ethics not yet examined would be to 
 beg the question. 
 
 The positive argument for holding moral law rather 
 than end or good to be the most distinctive thing in ethics 
 is a stringency in certain ethical judgments that never 
 seems derivable even from our own most decisive estimates 
 of goods. At least I have tried and failed to derive it 
 in my own case. Though I have no doubt that justice 
 is connected as a means with Hberty as an end in politics, 
 I have not found that derivation ethically sufficient for 
 the establishment of the principles of justice. And when 
 we define good by a less abstract term than the political 
 end, its insufficiency to support properly ethical judgments 
 becomes more obvious. 
 
 Let us try to find a substitute in Comte's formulation 
 of "altruism" as the characteristically ethical attitude.
 
 Ill] END AND LAW IN ETHICS 33 
 
 For if there is any hope of general agreement, it might 
 seem to be here. Devotion to Humanity, in the whole 
 complex of its interests, is to be supreme; but under it 
 various ideal directions are allowed. Art or knowledge, 
 for example, may rightly be pursued as ideal ends. Those 
 who select these ends, Comte recognises, must have an 
 impassioned interest in them, not simply determined by 
 relation to the ethical direction of life. No artist or man 
 of science could more emphatically declare that in- 
 tellectual or artistic work done from a sense of duty 
 without enjoyment in the exercise of the special faculty 
 would be valueless. But, this granted, he also declares 
 that the aim of serving Humanity must be supreme. 
 Speciahsm undirected by some general idea, or the 
 cultivation of technical accomphshment out of relation 
 to any wide view of nature or human hfe, are to be 
 conscientiously repressed by the student or artist who 
 feels a temptation to them; and, if they are not thus 
 repressed, pubUc opinion ought to disapprove of them as 
 immoral deviations. Now, so far as I myself am con- 
 cerned, I am quite willing to comply with that condition, 
 and to test my pursuits or have them tested in relation to 
 general interests of Humanity. In the study of the 
 history of philosophy, for example, I indulge no purely 
 antiquarian impulse; if I study a special period, it is 
 for the sake of getting a grasp of the historical movement 
 as a whole with a bearing on the present. Thus, I have 
 no personal interest in maintaining that the moral 
 criterion is not applicable in the way that Comte holds; 
 but actually I do not find it applicable in that way. If 
 any one has more decidedly the impulses of a specialist, 
 I think he has a right to follow them. Minute curiosity, 
 w. E. 3
 
 34 END AND LAW IN ETHICS [CH. 
 
 or the attraction of some special kind of beauty, without 
 any obvious human interest, may be the motives under 
 which he can best work ; and it is really a question of right. 
 A case exactly to the purpose is that of Roger Bacon. 
 It is quite possible that, from any social point of view, 
 what was needed in the thirteenth century was not the 
 direction of thought to physical science. None the less, 
 I hold that the restriction of his scientific researches by 
 authority was absolutely a wrong. What his own motives 
 were is quite irrelevant to the question of right. He may 
 have been seeking his highest good in the satisfaction 
 of curiosity. He may, like Francis Bacon afterwards, 
 have had a prevision of the social services to be rendered 
 by science in a future age. If he had this prevision, it 
 may have been accompanied by philanthropic emotion or 
 by pure indifference. In any case, his right was not 
 ethically suppressible by his Society's as opposed to his 
 own choice of good. When Comte speaks of duties as 
 alone existent without rights, he uses a term to which he 
 is not entitled. If other persons have no rights, or if 
 Humanity has no rights, how can there be a duty to serve 
 them? In actual fact, the violation of justice (to which 
 Comte personally was very sensitive) makes a totally 
 different impression from anything we can derive ethically 
 from our own or any one's choice of good. The choice 
 of good may be largely an affair of rational preference; 
 we may think that persons who choose differently fail in 
 rationality; but, till the question of justice comes in, 
 there does not seem to be that which characterises strictly 
 moral approval or disapproval. This is really unique; 
 and it is here, I hold, that the a priori element in ethics is 
 inexpugnable.
 
 Ill] END AND LAW IN ETHICS 36 
 
 On the other hand, UtiHtarian thinkers are irrefutable 
 when they insist on the emptiness of all efforts to deduce 
 actual human conduct from abstract rights and duties. 
 It is quite true that, to get anything out of their formulae, 
 the pure Rationalists have to introduce utilitarian con- 
 siderations (references to ends or goods) surreptitiously. 
 What Utihtarians cannot get out of their ends is stringent 
 obligation. What Rationalists cannot get out of their 
 forms or laws is any actual end to be pursued. Now here 
 I think comes in the reconcihation. Just because the 
 ends are not in themselves obligatory, while yet all the 
 content of human Hfe depends on them, there is room for 
 the selection of different ends. But, while these are not 
 pointed out by the moral law, the moral law assigns 
 limiting conditions of their pursuit. It is at certain 
 critical points, where these conditions are definitely in 
 question, that strictly moral choice occurs. To make the 
 right or wrong choice in these critical cases is to succeed 
 or fail in the observance of justice or the moral law. 
 Thus there is no specially "moral life"; but morality in 
 the distinctive sense is of universal obHgation. What is 
 sometimes thought to be the ideally moral life, namely, 
 the hfe of philanthropy or of extended altruism, is one 
 ideal direction not necessarily more moral than any other. 
 Psychologically it may be directed by love in the most 
 enlarged sense ; but love as a psychological principle is not 
 a criterion, but is simply the natural spring of all social 
 action. This is quite clearly so if we include "self-love," 
 and self-love can reasonably be included according to 
 Comte's sociological view ; for, man being fundamentally 
 social, his egoism can never be that of an isolated animal 
 being ; or at least this limit is reached only in the lower 
 
 3—2
 
 36 END AND LAW IN ETHICS [CH. 
 
 order of criminals, who, as Comte says, are less organic 
 parts of Humanity than the domestic animals. It has 
 often been noted what a strong social element there is even 
 in the most egoistic ambitions ; so that the egoist of really 
 high intellect usually becomes, whether that is his direct 
 aim or not, in some way greatly serviceable to human life. 
 It appears then on the whole clear that various types 
 may have the right to choose different kinds of good 
 and to pursue them in their difference, and that all may 
 be equally moral in doing this. No one, however, can 
 say that he has the right to disregard justice. This pro- 
 position is not merely verbal ; for, as will be seen, justice 
 is not one end among others, to be taken or left, but 
 assigns the conditions under which all ends are to be 
 pursued. Eight and wrong, in the strict and not merely 
 vague sense, are predicates of relations among persons, 
 and not of the total consequences of an action. In 
 human action, it is possible to know right and wrong, 
 but impossible to know what action will have the best 
 possible consequences. Still, the intelligence that applies 
 the moral law, as well as the intelligence that calculates 
 consequences, is fallible; so that cases of doubt are 
 unavoidable. The a priori moralists have never been 
 able to avoid them any more than the Utilitarians. 
 Perhaps it is the a priori elements in moral systems that 
 have been the most fertile in casuistry. Casuistry cannot 
 be eluded. In the mode of reconciliation put forward, 
 indeed, both consequences and a priori principles are 
 relevant in all actual decisions as to v/hat we shall do. 
 The position, however, seems to me to be simplified 
 rather than complicated by this admission; because it 
 leaves relatively few cases distinctively cases of moral
 
 Ill] END AND LAW IN ETHICS 37 
 
 conscience. For, if our general mode of life is compatible 
 with the rule of right, clearly the larger part of what we 
 have to consider depends on consequences, and the means 
 to learning these is knowledge and practice in our own 
 mode of life: we have not to be considering at every 
 moment the bearings of our ethical code. Stringency of 
 the doctrine in one aspect can thus coexist with the highest 
 degree of spontaneity on the part of the individual in 
 choosing and following the good. 
 
 The generalised doctrine of right or justice I propose 
 to call distinctively Abstract Ethics. The pursuit of 
 good in its detail may be called the Art of Life, but in 
 reality this consists of many arts, instinctive, empirical, 
 or deduced from some branch or branches of science as 
 the case may be. Concrete or Apphed Ethics is con- 
 cerned with the pursuit of good when it comes into con- 
 tact with the principles of Abstract Ethics. By this 
 division the defects both of the purely a priori and the 
 purely a posteriori systems are avoided. The error of 
 both, where they were in error, was in exaggerating 
 the function of the moral philosopher. The ideal of 
 moral philosophy was supposed to be the furnishing of 
 a code for daily practice through the whole of life. But 
 only a very morbid hfe can ever be a perpetual series of 
 cases of conscience. The position of abstract ethics as 
 a science resembles most that of logic. Thought does 
 not go on, in the logician any more than in any one else, 
 as an apphcation of the laws of logic ; but those laws can 
 be applied if necessary as its test. So also action does 
 not go on in the ethical philosopher any more than in 
 any one else by way of regular deduction from moral 
 principles, but the moral law can be apphed as its test
 
 38 END AND LAW IN ETHICS [CH. Ill 
 
 in case of doubt; or if action is challenged from outside 
 as wrong and not merely as unwise, its defence must be 
 in terms of the moral law. "I did it for the best" may 
 be accepted as an excuse when ends are in question. 
 When an infringement of the law of justice is in question, 
 it is not held to be an adequate reply. 
 
 Abstract Ethics is not a thing that remains to be 
 constructed. What I propose to do next is to show 
 where it is to be found. Then I shall proceed to develop 
 the present distinctions in more detail.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 
 
 The foundation of abstract ethics dates from the 
 seventeenth century. Though, as actual precepts, all the 
 ideas that constitute it are to be met with in antiquity, 
 and though a doctrine hke Stoicism could now find the 
 fittest expression in its terms, yet all the ancient systems 
 may be called relatively concrete. So also may most of 
 the ethical systems of modern times; for it is only by 
 degrees that the difference in point of view has become 
 clear; and it cannot even be said that there has been 
 perfectly steady progress to its recognition. Indeed the 
 movement in the nineteenth century rather tended to 
 the view that abstract ethical discussion of rights and 
 of justice could be nothing but an affair of more or 
 less convenient, but sometimes dangerously misleading, 
 fictions. We were concerned with the ends and the real 
 conditions of conduct, not with those artificial and quasi- 
 legal or quasi-mathematical conceptions of the rule of 
 right and the fitness of things dating from a period that 
 lacked the historical sense, ignored progress, and thought 
 you could lay down a law valid for all times and countries, 
 or even, as Kant said in an extravagance of Trans- 
 cendentalism, not merely for men but for all rational 
 beings in any possible universe.
 
 40 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 It will be admitted that the outcome of the age in 
 which this "realistic" current, with its collective "will 
 to " one thing or the other as the ultimate reason, arrived 
 at its culmination, has not exactly been such as to con- 
 demn in advance a reconsideration of the question whether 
 the first business of moral philosophy is not to establish 
 a law eternally vahd. I do not wish, however, to put it 
 rhetorically, but scientifically. It seems to me demon- 
 strable that, while the reaction against the most typical 
 statements of the "absolute" ethics of moral law were in 
 a measure justified, the great step taken by ethics in 
 modern times has been to give more abstract clearness to 
 the statement of law as distinguished from end. This 
 transition, as it appears in the same age, so also resembles 
 in character the transition from the "synthetic" geometry 
 of the ancients to the analytical geometry of Descartes. 
 It is not in the least that ancient ethics is like ancient 
 geometry, or that modern abstract ethics is like modern 
 analytical geometry; but there is a resemblance of re- 
 lations. In both cases a definite step was taken to a 
 higher degree of abstraction. 
 
 The true founder of modern abstract ethics did not 
 belong to the fine of thinkers classed as "Apriorists," but 
 to the fine of the great Enghsh Experientiahsts. His 
 ultimate foundation of ethics was not, indeed, finally 
 adequate. The only way in which it could be made 
 adequate was by principles expressly stated against him 
 in his own time by embittered opponents; but in effect 
 he had framed a new and more abstract conception that 
 could not permanently be lost. It was indeed the very 
 clearness with which he had defined his conception that 
 showed his principles to be insufficient.
 
 IV] THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 41 
 
 Thus Descartes was not wrong when, displeased as he 
 was with Hobbes's criticisms of his metaphysics, he saw 
 in him the promise of a new power in the moral sciences. 
 For the De Cive (published in 1642) was in reahty the 
 outline of a new demonstrative method in ethics com- 
 parable for revolutionary importance to Descartes's 
 Method and Meditations in metaphysics. As in the case 
 of Descartes, there had been a long preparation in the 
 intermediate period for this sudden apparition of a new 
 way of stating fundamental problems. The preparation 
 for Descartes's primary reference of the problem of know- 
 ledge to the consciousness of the thinker, consisted in 
 the precision given by long scholastic manipulation to 
 conceptions arrived at in the last period of ancient thought. 
 The preparation for Hobbes's ethics and politics was the 
 similar scholastic manipulation of the generalised positions 
 underlying the later Roman law as put into form under 
 influences from philosophy. Here also that which had 
 been arrived at as a result, and had in the meantime 
 been forced within an alien framework, was now liberated 
 and became a new beginning with not yet revealed 
 possibilities of future application. 
 
 It is remarkable that the titles of the three divisions 
 of the De 6'we— "Libertas," "Imperium," "Religio"— 
 correspond respectively to the predominant elements in 
 what had been till then the three chief phases in the past 
 historical development of Europe, viz., Greek and Itahan 
 city-State; Macedonian and Roman Empire; Christian 
 Theocracy. Probably this was not in Hobbes's mind. 
 The order for him was not an order in time but a rational 
 order. His theoretical scheme was intended as an analysis 
 of the elements in all States ; and of course in the history
 
 42 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 of Europe from classical antiquity onward we do not 
 find any of the elements absent at any stage. Yet there 
 are differences of degree. An ancient city-State un- 
 doubtedly included dominion and religion ; but to us 
 liberty seems relatively predominant in it as compared 
 with the later political order of antiquity. So, in the 
 next stage, autocracy did not exclude all liberty, and it 
 sought aid in the revival of religion ; but the dominion 
 of the monarch as representing the State remains 
 characteristic. Again, under theocracy there were re- 
 cognised private and municipal liberties, and it could not 
 subsist without empire or monarchy ; but what seems to 
 us characteristic is religion newly-organised as a power 
 for systematically controlling human life. 
 
 Hobbes's age had been preceded by the break-down 
 of this; and his political interest lay in showing the 
 necessity of " Imperium " — the dominion of the national 
 States of the new Europe, best centralised, he thought, 
 in national monarchies — as the means of control. Primi- 
 tive liberty is an anarchy that has to be overcome ; and 
 religion, as he knew it in his time, seemed to him a 
 principle of strife hostile to civil order. For all that, 
 he finds it possible to found ethics rationally, though not 
 to get it into action, in an assumed state of anarchy. 
 Men are imagined as at first relatively isolated beings, 
 seeking their own good, but under no settled government. 
 This state of "liberty" thus means in practice "war of 
 all against all." Yet there is a natural or moral law 
 discernible by human intelligence, though in the state of 
 war no one can consistently keep it, because no one can 
 have security that it will be observed by others reci- 
 procally. Here, it has not been sufficiently observed,
 
 IV] THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 43 
 
 Hobbes sets himself free at the outset ahke from meta- 
 physical and naturalistic fallacy, from political and 
 theological " heteronomy." His own conception of moral 
 or natural law is carefully distinguished both from law 
 in the sense of "uniformity of nature" and from law in 
 the sense of command by a political superior or a super- 
 natural ruler. Laws of nature in the ethical sense he 
 defines as " certain conclusions understood by reason, con- 
 cerning things to be done and left undone^." The moral 
 law is the rule which all ought to have the intention 
 and to make the effort to observe whenever its observance 
 becomes possible. It is "natural" not as consisting in 
 conformity to certain physical (any more than meta- 
 physical) reahties, but as ascertainable by the reason 
 natural to men without other aid. In order that the 
 moral law may be actually observed, what is necessary 
 is the security given by a government. This may be 
 democratic, aristocratic or monarchical. When it is con- 
 stituted, the duty of obedience to it becomes paramount ; 
 for only in the state of peace as opposed to the state of 
 war can there be observance of the moral law. Because 
 the law cannot be observed without it, a dictate of the 
 law of nature is to seek peace, and, having obtained it, 
 not to lapse into the state of war. Fundamentally the 
 law of nature, the observance of which the State now 
 makes possible, is the law of justice, summed up in such 
 precepts as, to render to each his own, to keep contracts, 
 not to do to another what we would not that another 
 should do to us. Thus we have passed from an un- 
 restricted liberty of all to do anything, which was of 
 
 1 De Cive, iii. 33: " conclusiones quaedam ratione intellectae, de 
 agendis et omittendis."
 
 44 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 no value to anyone precisely because it was unrestricted, 
 to a dominion of one man or of an assembly (either 
 limited to a class or including the whole people or its 
 representatives), which by the restraint of law makes 
 secure certain "rights" that are the residue of primitive 
 liberty. To "natural rehgion" — the reHgion that might 
 have been arrived at by human reason — Hobbes regards 
 the notion of a moral government of the universe as 
 essential : for it, the moral laws become divine commands. 
 Such a natural religion would have offered no difficulty 
 to the civil State, of which it would simply have con- 
 firmed the legislation so far as this was in accordance 
 with natural law^ ; but, in deahng ^vith actual religion, 
 he was confronted with the rival claims of every clergy 
 to enforce its own version of the Judaeo-Christian revela- 
 tion as a power above all States. His method of 
 deahng with these was not directly to propose that the 
 State should refuse to recognise any but natural religion ; 
 though he made an approach to this in setting forth 
 a much reduced account of what the revelation might be 
 construed to mean. The position for which with all 
 his strength he contended was that no coercive authority 
 on behalf of any religion, and no power of judging what 
 
 ^ I do not think it is possible to know Hobbes's ultimate thought 
 about religion; but I seem to find a reserve in favour of the possible 
 truth of ethical theism. 
 
 In the famous definitions of Leviathan (Part i, chap. 6) he was of 
 course indulging his humour, deliberately accentuating what gave 
 scandal in his exaltation of the State. " Feare of power invisible, feigned 
 by the mind, or imagined from tales publiquely allowed, Religion; not 
 allowed, Superstition." 
 
 In De Give (xvi. 1) he is at least not obviously ironical when he 
 describes superstition as having its source in "fear without right reason" ; 
 atheism, in "the opinion of reason, without fear."
 
 IV] THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 45 
 
 it meant, should be exercised by any but the civil magis- 
 trate. Ultimately, for rehgion as for everything else, 
 there must be a power in the State with which the final 
 decision rests, and there can be no separation of powers. 
 In a commonwealth where a priesthood rules, the 
 ultimate power rests with it in rehgion also because it 
 is in effect itself the civil government, not because it has 
 any rights as against the State. 
 
 Now what interests us at present in Hobbes's ethico- 
 political system is to know whence came historically its 
 distinctively ethical element. It has already become 
 evident that, in spite of his absolutism, he has to derive 
 it from the state of hberty. Only thus could he make 
 his morahty really autonomous. But, to determine how 
 autonomous morahty had come to be the ideal, we must 
 review the historical series of pohtical types. 
 
 Beginning at the beginning, even those whose political 
 sympathies are with Hobbes's republican contemporaries 
 must admit that the city-republics of Greece had some of 
 the disadvantages of hberty as it exists in the state of 
 nature, before there are laws. Relatively to modern 
 governments, their governments were weak, and inade- 
 quate to preserve order. They were torn by factions 
 compared with which the pohtical parties of modern 
 times represent very mild differences. Most important of 
 all, small as they were they could not, even when con- 
 fronted with an outer world of much greater magnitude 
 and of inferior civilisation, arrive at any permanent 
 agreement to avoid war among themselves. Through 
 Macedon and afterwards through Rome (which under its 
 aristocratic Repubhc had coordinated Italy) government 
 became stronger and civil security increased if hberty
 
 46 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 in its good as well as in its bad sense decayed. The 
 common rule of many cities and provinces, under Rome 
 as under Macedon, was found in the long run impracticable 
 except by a peculiar combination of "Imperium" and 
 "Religio." The new imperial monarchs, beginning with 
 Alexander, revived from the dead or dying religions of 
 Babylon and Egypt the idea of the king as divine in- 
 carnation^. When a new revealed rehgion arose, and the 
 system of the Roman Empire passed into a theocracy, 
 the king or emperor ruled, no longer indeed as a "god 
 manifest," but as the vicegerent of the supreme God. 
 And, when the Empire, under barbarian impact, broke 
 into fragments, the separated theocratic power (as Hobbes 
 himself noted) seemed to hold dominion as the ghost of 
 the no longer existent unity. It would thus be obvious, 
 and not long since it would have been fashionable to say, 
 See how beneficent and how indispensable are force and 
 illusion ! Yet it would not have been the deepest truth. 
 Whatever the world owes to these powers, it does not 
 owe to them the essential thing in ethics. 
 
 Of this, though of course nothing exactly like his 
 "state of nature" ever existed, the historic origin was 
 not unlike that which was postulated by Hobbes. In the 
 ancient cities there was, as everywhere among men, the 
 pursuit of ends, which for simplicity may be considered, 
 as Hobbes considered it, egoistic. This was regulated by 
 customary laws {vofxoi), about the origin of which it 
 must be left to anthropologists to form conjectures. 
 
 ^ See, for a history of the process in the case of the Macedonian 
 monarchies, Greek Imperialism (1913), by Professor W. Scott Ferguson. 
 I cannot, however, follow the writer in admitting an important influence 
 from Aristotle in Alexander's assumption of divinity.
 
 IV] THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 47 
 
 Whatever this may have been, they could not retain 
 their sanctity in a world where there was constant com- 
 parison with different customary laws and constant 
 discussion among ingenious minds occupied with moral 
 and political questions. Meanwhile, the philosophers 
 thought out moral systems in relation to their conceptions 
 of the true good of man ; but evidently these could not 
 dominate whole communities. Thus we are confronted 
 with the phenomena of dissolution usually ascribed to 
 decay of belief. But, while customary law and ethics 
 had been breaking down and the philosophic schools had 
 only been able to construct systems for a few to live by, 
 the result of the existence of free States with their de- 
 liberative assemblies and their law courts, in which also 
 the method was debate, had been the evolution of another 
 kind of law whereby the inevitable conflicts of interest 
 among individuals pursuing their own good were adjusted 
 according to norms that all could recognise as apphcable. 
 This process, begun in Greece, was more systematically 
 carried forward by the Roman jurists. As historians 
 allow, its basis was essentially laid under the Roman 
 RepubUc. Under the monarchy, the original impulse 
 having been given before, development could go on by 
 deductive logic and consultation of precedents. Thus, 
 when free political life had ceased, the autocrat became the 
 organ of the moral law imphcit in the legal codes. That 
 this was the real value of the monarchy was pointed out 
 by later philosophers, who regarded it as in this respect 
 replacing the want of sufficient virtue in the multitude. 
 As has been already suggested, this view is quite in 
 accordance with the essential thought of Hobbes ; though 
 it would not have suited his polemical purpose to put it
 
 48 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 exactly in that way. For Hobbes, conceiving the moral 
 law as a system of rules capable of being worked out, 
 though not applied, by rational men even in a state of 
 anarchy, never anywhere treats either government or 
 religion as the creator of morality. In his view, one who 
 observes the law only because of punishments or rewards, 
 whether natural or supernatural, is not truly moral. 
 
 Doubtless in this historical development the con- 
 ception of justice had become in a manner externalised. 
 When, in the statement of the moral law, the command 
 of a sovereign, human or divine, was placed at the summit, 
 and "sanctions" were brought constantly into view as 
 the means of enforcing it in the absence of inward dis- 
 position; when, moreover, freedom of discussion was 
 limited to deductions from what was given ; it is evident 
 that we can no longer expect such impressive appeals to 
 eternal right as we find in the Attic drama. Yet the 
 real spring of the development was in the self-evidence 
 of this inward law beyond sanctions; and Hobbes, in 
 spite of his paradoxes in laying down the duty of un- 
 quahfied obedience to the sovereign, has as clear a view 
 of it essentially as any one. Nowhere did he make this 
 clearer than when he expressly put another selected 
 formula by the side of a formula authorised by rehgion. 
 It may seem, he says, at first sight difficult to know 
 whether any proposed action is or is not in accordance 
 with the laws of nature, these having been deduced 
 by an artificial process from their tendency to our 
 conservation. There is, however, an easy rule. Let 
 any one, when in doubt whether that which he is 
 about to do to another is in accordance with natural 
 law or not, conceive himself in that other's place.
 
 IV] THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 49 
 
 "Atque haec regula non modo facilis, sed etiam dudum 
 celebrata liis verbis est, quod tihi fieri non vis, alteri ne 
 feceris'^." Here he deKberately chooses the negative 
 form of the law of reciprocity (found for example in 
 Isocrates) : " Do not to another what you would not 
 that another should do to you." The positive form 
 given in the Gospel (Matt. vii. 12), he remarks^, is 
 "almost in the same words" (totidem pene verbis); thus 
 dissociating the precept of natural justice from any 
 intrinsic dependence on a divine command. The rule 
 that we are to keep our contracts is similarly made prior 
 to the pact or covenant into which the chosen people of 
 God was said to enter. The promise in Deuteronomy^ 
 made by the people to observe the law of Moses is treated 
 as a particular case of a contract, the meaning and 
 obligations of which are to be determined by an application 
 of the general principles of natural justice. The law, to 
 love your neighbour as yourself, that is, as Hobbes 
 interprets it, to recognise his equal right, to imagine 
 yourself in his place when you are free from passion, 
 existed even before Moses: "for it is the natural law, 
 having its beginning with the rational nature itself*." 
 Thus Hobbes's conception of moraUty, as Groom 
 
 1 De Cive, iii. 26. 
 
 2 Ibid., iv. 23. 
 
 ' Hobbes anticipated the whole course of Biblical criticism from 
 Spinoza onward to the most recent schools in declaring Deuteronomy 
 the earliest book of the Law {De Cive, xvi. 12). 
 
 * De Cive, xvii. 8. Cf. xvii. 13, where the distinction is still 
 more expressly drawn between the teaching of justice and observation 
 of the natural laws "ut theoremata per rationem naturalem ; deducendo 
 jus et leges naturales a principiis contractibusque humanis" and "ut 
 leges per auctoritatem divinam, ostendendo talem esse voluntatem 
 Dei." 
 
 w. E. 4
 
 50 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 Robertson has said^, does not exclude "anything that 
 the consciousness of mankind recognises as duty or 
 virtue in the individual." Altruism as a spring of 
 obedience to the moral law is on occasion recognised^. 
 "Right reason," on which his contemporary opponents 
 took their stand, is constantly declared to be existent 
 prior to positive law. Although the supreme power, 
 once constituted, is absolute, and no right of rebellion 
 can be recognised in subjects, yet it is the duty of those 
 who hold the supreme power to obey right reason^. The 
 ethical laws of nature are immutable and eternal*. Even 
 between States they remain vahd as "divine law," though 
 they cannot be enforced^. How then was it that his 
 system became for a time so discredited morally? 
 
 The causes were not entirely inherent in the real 
 character of the system. Unfairness and prejudice were 
 not absent even in an opponent of high philosophic power 
 
 1 Hohhes, p. 143. 
 
 2 De Cive, xviii. 3: "qui amant proximum, non possunt non velle 
 obedire legi morali, quae consistit, ut supra capite tertio ostensum 
 est, in superbiae, ingratitudinis, contumeliae, inhumanitatis, inclementiae, 
 injuriae similiumque offensarum prohibitione, quibus proximi laeduntur." 
 
 ^ Ibid., xiii. 2: ''officii tamen eorum est rectae rationi, quae lex est 
 naturalis moralis et divina, quantum possunt in omnibus obedire." 
 
 * Ibid., iii. 29: "Leges naturae immutabiles et aeternae sunt: quod 
 vetant, nunquam licitum esse potest: quod jubent, nunquam illici- 
 tum." 
 
 * Ibid., xiv. 5: "Humana lex omnis civilis est. Nam extra civi- 
 tates status hominum hostilis est; in quo, quia alter alteri non sub- 
 jicitur, leges praeter dictamina rationis naturalis, quae lex divina est, 
 nullae sunt." Hobbes's exclusion of the thought of an international 
 law is thus less absolute than Spinoza's (see Tractatus Politicus, iii. 
 13, 14). Spinoza, on the other hand, in incorporating the general 
 positions of Hobbes, makes clear, as Hobbes did not, the limits beyond 
 which a tyrannic power will find itself unable to enforce civil obedience 
 within the State.
 
 IV] THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 51 
 
 like Cudworth. Yet it remains true that Hobbes could 
 not ultimately justify his own conception of virtue and 
 duty in their inwardness by the reasons he gives. Justice, 
 in his view, is most certainly not merely prudence; 
 yet, if it could be explained wholly on his principles as 
 the means adapted to the end he assigns, that is what 
 it would be reduced to. It is of course quite true that the 
 enforcement of certain rules of justice by the State is the 
 means to "peace and defence," and that it is on the whole 
 to the interest of every individual that the State should 
 be strong enough to enforce them. Thus Hobbes, by 
 assuming a primeval conflict of egoistic interests, and by 
 supposing men rational enough to seek a way of ad- 
 justing the perpetual strife that would otherwise go on, 
 can furnish a ground for the construction of a common- 
 wealth and its laws. If, however, we put the case as it 
 concerns the individual, and ask why any person should 
 observe the rule when he can clearly see that in the 
 particular case it is not to his interest and can be evaded 
 with impunity, what is the answer simply from the point 
 of view of the only ultimate end theoretically admitted, 
 viz., egoistic interest? A later way of meeting the 
 objection on Hobbes's experientiahst principles was by 
 means of a modified psychology, in which more account is 
 taken than by Hobbes of the altruistic elements in human 
 nature as a normal, and not merely exceptional and 
 incalculable, spring of action. But suppose these to 
 exist in fact, in what consists even then the strict obliga- 
 tion to observe the moral law? Hobbes and his con- 
 temporaries, being in general " intellectualists," would 
 have at once admitted the validity of Kant's argument 
 against founding ethics simply on benevolence; that no 
 
 4—2 
 
 \
 
 62 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 one can be obliged to feel in a certain way. In fact 
 Hobbes had put this in his own manner: the moral 
 obhgation is to an action, or, from the internal and more 
 properly ethical point of view, to an intention and efiort, 
 not to a feeling. The question then is, whether a person 
 has not strictly a right on Hobbes's principles, should he 
 happen to be in feeling a pure egoist, to ignore the interests 
 of the commonwealth in every case where they do not 
 include his own. And we must not of course suppose 
 a mere blunderer, who is sure to overreach himself, but 
 a man of insight who sees his way clear to profitable 
 injustice. It was in considerations of this kind that 
 Cudworth's attack on Hobbes's moral and political 
 system was ultimately based. No doubt he had in view 
 the dramatic representation of this type of thinking 
 by Plato, and its attempted self- justification by ideas 
 superficially resembling those of Hobbes. His own aim 
 was to place the moral law above everything even in 
 appearance arbitrary. As a Platonising theologian, he 
 held the intellect to be prior to the will of God. The 
 moral law is a divine command because it is right; it is 
 not right because commanded. Similarly political com- 
 mand is in the second place in relation to the law of 
 justice as intellectually discerned. Now although this, 
 if we look closely, is in effect conceded by Hobbes, his 
 system certainly gave a different impression. It seemed 
 as if justice in his view was finally identical with the will 
 of the State, and even as if the State could make a 
 doctrine true or false, in the only meaning those words 
 can practically bear, at its arbitrary will. Some of this 
 was deliberate paradox to strike the public mind; and 
 undoubtedly it had that effect. On one side it was
 
 IV] THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 53 
 
 regarded with real or assumed horror; and on the other 
 side a kind of "immorahsm," having for its watchword 
 "power," hke that with which we have become recently 
 famihar, took pleasure in calling itself "Hobbism." Thus 
 historically the reaction of Cud worth and the Cambridge 
 Platonists was justified, and we have to inquire more 
 exactly what it meant and how far it succeeded or failed. 
 Essentially it meant that the moral law, conceived as 
 a law of justice, is ultimately a priori. This could be 
 argued without great difl&culty from the concessions of 
 Hobbes, who indeed anticipated the title of Cudworth's 
 Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality in 
 what he says himself of the moral law ; which is for him 
 also, as we have seen, an immutable and eternal law of 
 right reason. It was only necessary to show that the 
 experiential ground is insufficient. Now the sufficiency of 
 Hobbes's proof a posteriori, apart from external criticism, 
 is quite invalidated by incidental remarks of his own; 
 such as, that animals " non distinguunt injuriam a 
 damno^," and that men are so difficult to govern precisely 
 because they do make this distinction. For it necessarily 
 follows that the distinction is not a consequence of the 
 command of a political superior. If then, in spite of the 
 fact that all education in the principles of social justice 
 is and must be an affair of authorised tradition, the idea 
 of injustice as distinguished from loss or damage can 
 nevertheless be turned against the State itself, how, it 
 may be asked, can this idea be other than a priori ? For 
 it is quite inexpHcable as a mere subjective fancy of 
 particular minds. The notion of having suffered in- 
 justice in a particular case may, it is true, be a mere 
 
 ^ De Cive, v. 5.
 
 54 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 fancy; but there remains irremovable the constant 
 possibiHty of appeal to this generalised idea under which 
 alone the particular case becomes arguable. Morality, 
 then, is ultimately irreducible to a balance of gain and 
 loss. Underivable, as we saw, from direct egoistic cal- 
 culation, it is also underivable mediately from poUtical 
 command. 
 
 In the polemic of the Cambridge Platonists, however, 
 the purely ethical criticism of Hobbes's foundation of 
 morals was never quite disentangled from the meta- 
 physical criticism of his mechanical or "corporealist" 
 system of speculative doctrine. With Cudworth's suc- 
 cessor Samuel Clarke, the same attachment of the moral 
 law to the idea of theoretical truth remained. Both 
 alike were unable to escape, as Hobbes had already 
 escaped, from the "metaphysical fallacy." Hobbes re- 
 garded his "civil philosophy" as capable of standing on 
 its basis in the doctrine of human nature, without refer- 
 ence to the mechanical philosophy which formed the first 
 part of the complete system he had planned and partly 
 worked out. They, on the contrary, thought that, to 
 provide a basis for their ethics, they must first overthrow 
 materiahsm and establish a spiritualist metaphysic on 
 principles of pure reason. Hence Cud worth, in par- 
 ticular, spent most of his force on preliminaries. Not 
 only must materialism in all its phases be refuted so 
 far as it claimed to give an account of the whole ; but at 
 the same time the "true intellectual system of the 
 universe" must incorporate what was sound in the 
 physical doctrine of ancient and modern atomists. On 
 another side there was rising a new Protagorean sub- 
 jectivism, denying all knowledge as distinguished from
 
 IV] THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 55 
 
 opinion. This too must be refuted, as Plato had set 
 himself to refute Protagoras. The general result was, 
 not indeed a mere waste of power, for Cudworth's work 
 had effect, but certainly an expenditure of thought and 
 learning that on the whole seemed to miss the mark 
 through over-elaborateness. Though he was undoubtedly 
 driving at the thought of an "autonomous ethics," he 
 did not succeed in getting it adequately formulated. It 
 was with him an original thought, stimulated by opposition 
 to Hobbes and going beyond what had been expressed 
 by his Neo-Platonic masters; but, while the moral law 
 was by him set definitely against self-interest or arbitrary 
 will, he had not arrived at a clear understanding that it 
 was independent of intellectual truth about being. On 
 the metaphysical side he was more definitely than in 
 ethics a disciple rather than a discoverer ; so that it was 
 left to Berkeley to find a more modern way against the 
 " corporealists." In ethics, his direction v/as followed in 
 England only by thinkers of the second order. The next 
 effective step towards founding the type of doctrine to 
 which he had aspired was not taken before Kant. 
 
 During the eighteenth century, new development was 
 given, in the systems called utilitarian, to the doctrine 
 that makes ends supreme. Partly in subordination and 
 partly in opposition to this general doctrine, various 
 investigations were carried forward in the psychology of 
 ethics, as distinguished from ethics proper. Usually with 
 Hobbes in view as an opponent, the disinterested and 
 benevolent as contrasted with the selfish elements in 
 human nature were brought out. Theories of "moral 
 sense," "conscience," "sympathy," were set against the 
 doctrines that tended to make moral conduct an affair of
 
 56 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 calculation. So in later times we have had theories of 
 "intuition," ascribing merit to an action according to 
 the psychological rank of the motive from which it 
 proceeds. All these doctrines have their value and in- 
 terest, for all start from the description of something 
 that exists in human nature, however they may explain 
 it; but none could seriously compete with Utilitarianism 
 in the claim to furnish a standard. All the principles, 
 including conscience, the most impressive, have the 
 fault that they are "subjective" in the sense of varying 
 from individual to individual. No doubt we ought 
 to obey conscience; but how are we to form our 
 conscience? Of the origin of conscience, theories are 
 endless. 
 
 Love is too young to know what conscience is; 
 Yet who knows not conscience is born of love? 
 
 That is one theory, and it may be regarded as the zenith ; 
 but actual consciences are very varied, and no doubt it 
 would be true to say that some have their spring in fear. 
 Conscience therefore, Hke the other principles referred to, 
 belongs to "anthropology" in Kant's sense. He was not 
 without interest in this; and he did not at all deny the 
 merits of the psychological moralists of his century; but 
 he could find in them no solution of his own problem, 
 which he had clearly conceived as that of finding a rational 
 a priori law. Of the major systems that had preceded 
 his own, that of Hume is of course in principle entirely 
 governed by the idea of end. It was by his criticism of 
 metaphysics and theology, not by his ethics of "bene- 
 volent utilitarianism," that Hume influenced Kant. This 
 type of doctrine Kant had constantly in view, but simply
 
 IV] THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 57 
 
 as a type, not in its subtleties. To him it was the great 
 opposing doctrine, which it was his aim to supersede. 
 
 To understand the essential principles of Kant's ethics, 
 the best book to read is the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik 
 der Sitten (1785), which he wrote before the Kritik der 
 praktischen Vernunft (1788) in order to dispose in advance 
 of certain strictly scientific questions. The Practical 
 Reason is properly an episodic treatise on metaphysics in 
 so far as determined by ethics. The later Metaphysik 
 der Sitten (1797)^ is a return to the details of ethics in 
 greater complexity, and in effect set free from all attach- 
 ment to any speculative position. 
 
 For the title Metaphysic of Morals must not mislead 
 us. Kant was as free from the "metaphysical" as from 
 the " naturahstic " fallacy. And he was free consciously. 
 By "metaphysic of ethics" he did not mean a speculative 
 doctrine about reality, on which the theory of practice 
 was to be founded, but a "first philosophy" of ethics 
 itself, bringing out the principles essential to the con- 
 stitution of any rational system of morals. Thus he made 
 a genuinely new departure; for, while some others had 
 been free from the actual fallacies, no one before had 
 set himself to realise, in deliberate contrast to everything 
 else, the idea of what ought to be, independently ahke 
 of the physical sciences, of anthropology and of theology. 
 Kant holds his ethical doctrine to be true on any 
 supposition whatever as to the constitution of the uni- 
 verse. It is as true on the hypothesis of atheism as of 
 theism ; though in the Critique of Practical Reason it is 
 made the ground for postulating theism. It is as true for 
 
 ^ Comprising the Metaphysische Anfangsgrilnde der JRechtslehre and 
 the Metaphysische AnfangsgrUnde der Tugeyidlehre.
 
 58 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 all other rational beings, if any exist, as for men. If we 
 start from the matter of the will, the end, and not from 
 its form, the law, then there are no metaphysical prin- 
 ciples of ethics ; but the theory of virtue is then corrupted 
 at its source^. The true basis of ethics is thought, not 
 feeling. What we have to aim at is the statement of 
 certain universal maxims for the conduct of all rational 
 beings. The supreme maxim cannot be merely hypo- 
 thetical: Act in such and such a way if you desire a 
 certain end (say, the happiness of mankind). It must be 
 categorical. The first form in which Kant states it is 
 the famous "categorical imperative": Act according to 
 the maxim that can at the same time be made universal 
 law. 
 
 After more than a century of discussion, the verdict 
 of criticism seems to be that this is too purely formal to 
 enable us to proceed to any propositions whatever re- 
 lating to ends. Yet Kant's system, in his own view, 
 stands or falls according as this passage is or is not prac- 
 ticable. From the form of the moral law, we must be 
 able to arrive at propositions that can positively determine 
 actual conduct in its ends. If this were true without 
 qualification, I think we should have to conclude that 
 Kant's ethical doctrine has failed, for no ends are de- 
 ducible from mere formal law. I have indicated, however, 
 in what manner his position seems to me to remain 
 valid. We must recognise that the moral law could not 
 exist at all except for beings pursuing ends, and that 
 these ends can be determined only by experience. The 
 moral law therefore implies them, and does not assign 
 them. But, if the ends cannot be deduced from the law, 
 ^ Metaphysische Anfangsgrilnde der Tugendlehre, Vorrede.
 
 rv] THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 59 
 
 neither can the law, in all its stringency, be deduced from 
 the ends. This stringency is finally inexplicable from 
 pure experience. 
 
 On the other hand, Kant's "pure will" or "good will," 
 considered formally as the mere will to obey the moral 
 law, can by itself determine no action whatever. Utili- 
 tarianism, in the generahsed sense that some good is 
 the end, is the necessary method for determining actual 
 conduct. We must recognise this openly, not bring in 
 utilitarian considerations surreptitiously, as Kant does in 
 trying to construct a working system for the life of man 
 out of pure forms. 
 
 Even as a formal principle, Kant's categorical im- 
 perative seems to me to retain httle value. Professor 
 Juvalta (whose criticism will be found set forth in more 
 detail in the next chapter) makes the observation, which 
 is exactly to the point, that it fails to exclude some modes 
 of life generally regarded as immoral, and would exclude 
 some that are admitted to be moral, whatever other 
 objection might be taken to them. For the ruthless 
 pursuit of power is quite compatible with the maxim, 
 provided you do not complain when beaten, while the 
 mode of hfe of St Francis of Assisi is not. One of the 
 Kantian maxims, however, he allows, does go beyond a 
 mere empty formalism. Now this, while itself formal, 
 complies with the condition stated above. Making no 
 end part of the maxim, it yet recognises that man as the 
 subject of the moral law is a being pursuing ends. So 
 act (the maxim runs) as to treat humanity, in thy own 
 person as well as in the person of every other, always at 
 the same time as an end, never as a mere means. 
 
 This formula, Kant himself insists, is much more than
 
 60 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 "the trivial, quod tihi non vis fieri, etc."; for under it 
 positive duties can be brought, as they cannot be brought 
 under a merely negative formula^. This might lead to 
 a good deal of dialectic. First it could be remarked 
 that the law of contradiction also is negative and may be 
 called trivial; but that no one save a philosopher ever 
 seriously tries to carry it through the various portions 
 of his thinking in their mutual relations; and that no 
 system of philosophy that exists has been able to bear 
 its thoroughgoing application. Still, it could be said in 
 reply that the law of contradiction, though necessary, is 
 not sufficient to constitute even a system of logic, let 
 alone a system of philosophy; and that similarly, the 
 negative form of the law of reciprocity, though necessary, 
 is not sufficient even to make action formally right. 
 Without further discussion I am myself ready to admit 
 that Kant's maxim regarding the mutual respect of 
 persons for one another as ends and not mere means is 
 well entitled to a place of its own as a classical expression 
 of the idea of justice for a society in which freedom is 
 explicitly recognised. The negative formula selected by 
 Hobbes, applying to societies of all types, has less content. 
 The corresponding positive formula, Do to others as you 
 would that others should do to you, is of course logically 
 no more than equivalent to the negative formula. I 
 think it has been said with truth that whenever it appears 
 to mean more it is wrong. Gibbon found the negative 
 maxim (from Isocrates) the most apt to quote against 
 religious persecution. Certainly it would be more difficult 
 to reconcile in appearance with the negative than with the 
 
 ^ Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten {Werke, Berlin, G. Reimer, 
 Bd. iv. 1903, p. 430 note).
 
 rv] THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 61 
 
 positive formula that which has been called "persecution 
 from love^." 
 
 If Kant himself prefers the apparently most uni- 
 versalised maxim, called distinctively the categorical 
 imperative, to a maxim that recognises exphcitly the 
 existence of ends, this, I think, characterises the attempt 
 to do more with pure form than will ever be possible. 
 The merit of the second maxim is that, while it still has 
 the formal character of a priori law, it points to the kind 
 of matter (that is, the ends of persons), though not to any 
 particular matter, to which it is applicable. A third 
 formulation, in which it is laid down that moral legislation 
 must be imposed by the will on itself (autonomy as against 
 heteronomy) serves to bring out still more clearly the 
 conditions of a moral personality. The instabihty of 
 Kant's own position in so far as it claims to be pure 
 rationahsm is revealed when he says: How pure reason 
 can be for itself practical, that is, how the mere principle 
 of the universal validity of all its maxims as laws, without 
 any materially interesting object of the will, can itself 
 bring into operation a purely moral interest, no human 
 reason can explain^. The solution, I have already sug- 
 gested, is that there is nothing precisely of this kind for 
 it to explain. All rational action is and must be with 
 a view to ends thought as goods. The abstract moral law, 
 which is the law of justice, is a hmiting condition in the 
 pursuit of ends. That is how the recognition of it modifies 
 action; not by the determination of a special class of 
 positive actions that may be called moral in distinction 
 
 ^ Whether this aberration of benevolence ever existed I express no 
 opinion. A magnificent representation of it is to be found in Victor 
 Hugo's Torquemada. ^ Loc. cit. p. 461.
 
 62 
 
 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 from others. Even the special aim of promoting pubUc 
 justice — the aim of the kings and rulers beatified in 
 Dante's Heaven of Jupiter — is simply a mode of the 
 fulfilment of duty in a given position: it is not more 
 moral in itself, though it may be nobler or more meri- 
 torious, than any other fulfilment. What always deter- 
 mines a rational action is the notion of a good for oneself 
 or others. The enforcement of justice, for example, 
 may be regarded as a good for the commonwealth, and 
 to promote it as a form of altruism. Any action, whether 
 altruistic or egoistic, and whether positively meritorious 
 or not, may be called moral when it does not infringe the 
 laws of justice, conceived of course in the ethical and not 
 merely in the legal sense. This last condition is included 
 in the condition formulated by Kant as the autonomy in 
 distinction from the heteronomy of the will. Materially 
 a merely legal and a moral action may be the same ; but 
 an action performed because of external compulsion has 
 not the character of a moral action properly so-called. 
 Here, at least, all moralists are in agreement. 
 
 What remains of Kant's a priori method is the recog- 
 nition that the supreme ethical maxims, though by them- 
 selves insufficient to determine a positive code of conduct, 
 have a validity that no deduction from ends could confer 
 on them. The law of justice is not a mere means to any 
 good whatever ; though action in accordance with it is 
 undoubtedly a means to the greatest goods. Hence the 
 utihtarian arguments for the observance of justice have 
 always been felt, even by those who could think of nothing 
 better, to be an imperfect reply to objections put in the 
 mouths of imaginary sophistical casuists. They seemed 
 too much like the maintenance of a mere general rule,
 
 IVJ THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 63 
 
 once fixed by prescription, against the insight of science 
 or direct intuition. And it is not only egoism, but 
 frequently altruism, that rises up against the rules of 
 justice. I need only mention benevolent schemes founded 
 on biology that involve treating the human race as a 
 herd. Yet, as I have admitted, on no theory are all 
 cases perfectly simple. How the rules of justice affect 
 actual conduct will be considered when we come to 
 discuss further the relation of abstract to concrete 
 ethics. Meanwhile, a few words, must be said on the 
 formalism of Kant in relation to developments since his 
 time. 
 
 Whether for disciples or opponents, this has been the 
 most impressive thing in Kant's ethics. The whole 
 complex system no one has ever accepted in its entirety ; 
 and, avowedly or not, the preliminary alike to following 
 and to criticising has always been artificial simplification. 
 This was the method of Hegel ; who, in putting forth all 
 his power to show the want of content in Kant's formalism, 
 dealt with it as the most thoroughgoing utilitarian might 
 have done. Thus Hegel may be taken as typical of 
 Kant's critics. 
 
 His own doctrine, at the summit, is a doctrine of the 
 end or highest good, not of a priori law. The Hegelian 
 formula, "self-realisation," undoubtedly includes a regard 
 for personality absent from what is thought to be typical 
 utilitarianism, with its "hedonical calculus"; but, after 
 all, self-realisation is a formula of the Art of Life, not of 
 Abstract Ethics. In my view, it is a very good formula 
 in its own sphere; but it does not solve, but evades, 
 the real question raised by Kant. Of course it is not 
 necessarily an egoistic formula, and is not in the least
 
 64 THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS [CH. 
 
 incompatible with Comte's precept, "Live for others^." 
 The individual, for Hegel as for Comte, is in his very 
 nature social; a temporary embodiment of history, an 
 "abstraction" from the real being which is Humanity. 
 Self-realisation is realisation of the individual as at the 
 same time an organ of society. But, if we were to deal with 
 Hegel on the method of simplification applied to Kant, 
 we should have to say that justice is notavahd concept 
 in his system at all. The ultimate test of right is Fact. 
 Creon is as much, and as little, justified as Antigone. 
 The right of both is at once affirmed and cancelled in 
 the process that brings into collision the two elements in 
 human life summed up as the Family and the State. 
 Here the only reply is that, whatever this fancy may be 
 worth, it leaves the problem of justice unsolved; and 
 that we have the poet on our side. Sophocles leaves us 
 in no doubt that he regards the right as with Antigone, 
 and he suggests no solution such as Hegel's^. The problem, 
 how far justice is also fact, remains a problem. To an 
 Athenian audience, as to us, right was clearer than 
 ultimate fact. And certainly the Fact that is identical 
 with appearance was not the moral judge. 
 
 But, as Kant was not in reality a pure formalist, but 
 has much to say that takes full account of fact in concrete 
 cases, so Hegel was not in reality the mere worshipper of 
 
 ^ Kant himself had generalised the ends in the rival systems of ethics 
 before him in the two formulae: "one's own perfection" and "others' 
 happiness." Both of these he claimed to deduce as elements in his own 
 doctrine. 
 
 * An effect of Hegel's criticism has been that for English classical 
 scholarship Creon has become an embodiment of the Prussian State. 
 To an Athenian contemporary of Sophocles, this of course would have 
 meant not an embodiment of one relative right against another, but of 
 arbitrary despotism against the autonomy of the "good will."
 
 IV] THE HISTORY OF ABSTRACT ETHICS 65 
 
 present fact that he seemed in his conservative moods 
 to his revolutionary contemporaries. Fact is ultimately- 
 Thought; and Thought, evolving in history and its 
 highest products, which include systems of morality, is 
 only through a process not yet completed the judge of 
 all things. The final judgment has not been passed till 
 the highest expressions of the process have appeared. 
 This at any rate seems to me a fair interpretation ; but 
 I confess that I am criticising systems of which I am not 
 singular in finding the external form repellent. Even 
 Kant's system, it will scarcely be denied by his most 
 devoted disciples, is an ultra-Gothic edifice ; though Kant 
 belongs to the small number of thinkers of whom it can 
 be said that in sheer power they have no superior. But 
 philosophy, in spite of a common prejudice, is a pro- 
 gressive thing. And no degree of difficulty in really 
 profound thought has ever prevented its complete as- 
 similation by the European intellect. Of this the historical 
 destiny of Aristotle's Mela/physics is a sufficient proof. 
 Thus it was to be expected that the insight in Kant's 
 Ethics would sooner or later pass on, not without progress, 
 into a construction in some simpler style of architecture. 
 This expectation has been realised by the pubhcation of 
 Professor Juvalta's book, which I now proceed to ex- 
 pound. 
 
 W» £•
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA^ 
 
 Professor Jiivalta expressly distinguishes the old and 
 the new problem of morality as the problem of modern 
 ethics before and after Kant. The old problem was to 
 find the foundation of a morality about the content of 
 which there was agreement. The new problem is to 
 determine whether there are "values" specifically moral. 
 It is not new in the rigorous sense, for it was also the 
 problem of pre-Christian ethics; but it differs by dis- 
 carding the ancient presupposition that the moral good 
 must necessarily be a form of happiness. 
 
 To anticipate: it seeks the law instead of the end, 
 but requires that it should be intrinsic, an expression of 
 autonomy, not imposed by external authority. 
 
 For expounding Professor Juvalta's work, the simplest 
 way has seemed to me to be the most straightforward. 
 I shall follow his chapters and headings, and shall almost 
 limit myself to exposition without comment^. 
 
 ^ II Vecchio e il Nuovo Problema della Morale. By E. Juvalta. 
 Bologna: N. Zanichelli, 1914. 
 
 ^ One remark must be made on the translation of the word "cos- 
 cienza." I have rendered it by "conscience" or "consciousness" as 
 seemed convenient. It has no special significance for Juvalta's doctrine, 
 which is not a form of what used to be called Intuitionism, but of 
 Rationalism modified by contact with empirical theories of ethics.
 
 CH. V] THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA 67 
 
 The Foundation of Morality. 
 
 1. The Character of the Problem and its Forms. The 
 problem is fictitious, for there is no foundation outside 
 morality itself. Precisely for this reason, the dictates of 
 the moral conscience have not been accepted or rejected 
 according as they agreed or did not agree with ethical 
 systems, but, on the contrary, these have been accepted 
 or rejected according as they seemed adapted or un- 
 adapted to furnish the ground for moral convictions. 
 
 In fact, four types of solution have been put forward. 
 I. To consider moral principles as "truths," of which 
 the foundation is sought in a reality objectively given 
 to consciousness. II. To demonstrate the goodness of 
 that which morality prescribes, that is, to derive its norms 
 from an end or from a good or order of goods. III. To 
 prove its authority, founded either (A) in History, or 
 (B) in a Will distinct from the personal will and imposing 
 itself on this. 
 
 2. The Foundation sought in the Reality. The theo- 
 retical foundation is equally illusory whether it is sought 
 in "science" or in "metaphysics." For clearly, since 
 thinkers of equal good faith, and whose logical com- 
 petence can only be denied by a petitio principii, connect 
 the same moral criterion with different and opposed 
 theoretical principles, the proof fails that it is necessarily 
 connected with either to the exclusion of the other. But 
 whence springs the illusion? 
 
 On the side of science, it springs from the fallacy of 
 
 5—2
 
 68 THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA [CH. 
 
 seeking the way to certain results while leaving unproved 
 the implication that those results are desirable. By no 
 knowledge of the laws of society can the sociologist prove 
 that civihsation is preferable to barbarism. By no know- 
 ledge of the laws of life can the biologist prove that life is 
 worth Uving. Given a certain instinct or will to live, 
 reasons can be assigned for preferring a certain course of 
 conduct; but without that instinct or will no scientific 
 knowledge avails to determine any action whatever. 
 
 What has been said of science applies also to meta- 
 physics, so long as we mean by metaphysics knowledge 
 of an "intelligible" reality in so far as intelligible and not 
 as having value. Thus, to establish orders of being or 
 "degrees of reality" avails nothing unless the conception 
 of being includes that of good. ReaHty simply as existence 
 has no degrees. The apparent ethical bearing of Platonism 
 and related metaphysical doctrines comes from a synthesis 
 of "reality" and "perfection," of existence and value. 
 But the latter is not given in any metaphysical concept ; it 
 is carried over from a practical interest, conscious or not. 
 
 When a metaphysical doctrine is commended because 
 adapted to furnish the fomidation of "true morality," 
 does not this imply that we already know what true 
 moraHty is, apart from metaphysics? 
 
 3. The Foundation sought in a Justification from 
 Ends. The fallacy in the attempts made to translate 
 into a rigorous doctrine the derivation of moral values 
 from some incontestable " highest good " arises from this : 
 that while the essence of a moral value consists in its 
 pre-eminence over other values, it is treated as if it were 
 identical with or definable in terms of one of these other 
 values.
 
 V] THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA 69 
 
 The types may be classed under the heads of Utili- 
 tarianism and mystical Religiosity; the ends being re- 
 spectively Happiness and Holiness. 
 
 Let us set aside the famihar criticisms on Utihtarian- 
 ism, and concede that happiness has a determinate con- 
 tent and is a harmony of assignable goods, including 
 satisfaction of one's own conscience, and that it can be 
 demonstrated that constant observance of moral norms 
 is the sure and indispensable way to obtain it. It would 
 thus have been proved only that the moral values are 
 also eudaemonological values, not at all that the moral 
 value of an action consists in its being a means to happi- 
 ness. The question is not about the practical efficacy of 
 arguments for following the rules of morahty, but about 
 their theoretical conclusiveness. "Honesty is the best 
 policy" is not a moral reason for being honest. To 
 admit, with Mill, differences of "quality" in the con- 
 stituents of happiness, amounts in the end simply to 
 approving or disapproving, in the name of happiness, of 
 that which the moral conscience approves or disap- 
 proves^. 
 
 On the second type, the remark is to be made that 
 the consciousness of the religious mystic, though in the 
 form of a confused and not clear perception, contains 
 moral values that could not be drawn from the other 
 elements of the perception if they were not already there. 
 Moreover, they are incorporated as something that could 
 subsist apart, and incorporated for that reason. The 
 mystic conceives as morally perfect the Being he adores; 
 
 1 Satisfaction of conscience, it is noted, though a good, is not the end 
 of moral conduct; the end is the realising of that value which the 
 conscience recognises as moral.
 
 70 THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA [CH. 
 
 but no consciousness could find moral values in God if 
 it did not know them already as values and distinguish 
 them as moral from values of other kinds. 
 
 This conclusion is unaffected by doubt raised whether 
 the support of religion is not practically necessary for 
 maintaining a stable morality. The case is analogous 
 to that of Utilitarianism. As there, so here, the executive 
 point of view is extraneous to the properly moral question. 
 
 The same general argument appHes to mixed systems, 
 such as Theological Utilitarianism (hedonistic interpreta- 
 tion of the religious standard) and the Humanitarian 
 Mysticism of Comte (rehgious interpretation of the utih- 
 tarian standard)^. 
 
 However plausible from the present considerations, it 
 would nevertheless be precipitate to conclude that none 
 of these systems have properly ethical as distinguished 
 from hortatory or pedagogic importance. They do indeed 
 all fail in so far as they look for the reason of the supremacy 
 of moral values in something outside the values them- 
 selves; but, as a matter of fact, the different kinds of 
 values, moral and other, are connected in all sorts of 
 ways. For example, that which is the object of a moral 
 valuation, say, sincerity, can be estimated from the point 
 of view of an intellectual or artistic or economic interest. 
 Conversely, that which is the object of a hedonistic or 
 aesthetic or any other valuation, say, riches, art, learning, 
 can be estimated also as a good of moral order. Hence 
 arise complex problems of conciliation, among which 
 perhaps the reconciliation of virtue and happiness is not 
 the most important. 
 
 ^ It is expressly observed that the Utilitarianism of the latter is 
 altruistic ; the egoism of the former is imderstood.
 
 V] THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA 71 
 
 4. The Foundation sought in Authority. The authori- 
 tative character of the moral judgment and the imperative 
 form it takes, suggest its derivation from something that 
 transcends consciousness while revealing itself in it. 
 Accordingly, the foundation has been placed in historical 
 titles of nobility or in the will of a sovereign power. 
 
 A. The Historical Foundation. One form taken by 
 the appeal to history is that of "evolutionary ethics." 
 But in fact we judge of the evolution or selection of ideas 
 and feehngs by a criterion independent of the process. 
 That which by the hypothesis is its product decides 
 whether the evolution is morally progressive, regressive 
 or indifferent. It is not because juridical "progress" 
 has abolished torture that we condemn torture; it is 
 because we condemn torture that we recognise in its 
 abolition progress in the development of law. Apart 
 from some criterion of valuation, whatever it may be, 
 there are no "superior" or "inferior" forms of life. In 
 evolutionary ethics such a valuation is necessarily assumed, 
 not educed from the order of evolution itself; as was 
 seen when Spencer brought in the hedonistic criterion of 
 a pure pleasure corresponding to complete adaptation to 
 the environment. 
 
 This is no less seen when the evolution is internal and 
 psychical than when it is external and mechanical. Sub- 
 stitute a different scale of values, as Nietzsche did, and 
 what was called bv the democrat and the humanitarian 
 moral progress becomes a wretched degeneration. And, 
 when conscience, with its criterion of value, opposes itself 
 to that which at the moment has or seems to have the 
 support of history, it has just as good a case as the actual 
 fact, even from the historical point of view ; for history.
 
 72 THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA [CH. 
 
 which withdraws its support to-day, may give it to- 
 morrow. History is conservation and development, but 
 also innovation and opposition : in Hegelian terms, it is 
 one thing only because it is at the same time the other. 
 
 Even the history of reflective thought on the ethical 
 problem itself cannot furnish a solution, important as it 
 is for attaining clearness to our own minds. The efiort 
 after ethical unification in view of the systems revolves 
 around a content furnished by immediate moral ex- 
 perience, and assumes the validity of certain moral 
 judgments. Moreover, new moral intuitions make their 
 appearance from time to time, not only in the systems 
 elaborated by reflective thinkers but also outside all 
 systematic construction. Such affirmation of new values 
 is not the conclusion of a scientific or philosophical in- 
 vestigation, but a penetration or breaking of the moral 
 consciousness into the current of reflective thought, which 
 does not give them but receives them, illuminates but does 
 not create them. 
 
 B. The Foundation sought in a Will. In examining 
 the imperative character of moral precepts, a distinction 
 IS necessary. To speak of the "ought" or of "duty" as 
 characteristic of the moral valuation is equivocal. The 
 duty is not a duty of estimating, but of conforming the 
 action to the estimation. The moral valuation precedes 
 and justifies the obUgation, not vice versa. 
 
 The peculiarity of the moral valuation is that it implies 
 taking sides against any valuation that opposes it. Hence 
 its recognition exacts a constant attitude of the will. 
 Duty, in so far as it is characteristic of morality, that is, 
 in so far as it is internal and not reducible to the feehng 
 of an external compulsion, is the consciousness of what
 
 V] THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA 73 
 
 is demanded by the moral value; it manifests itself in 
 its clearest form when it is in conflict with motives of 
 another nature. Thus moral duty presupposes the moral 
 valuation. There would be no sense in speaking of a 
 duty of recognising moral values to a conscience closed 
 to every ethical valuation ; for this would amount to the 
 duty of feeling in a certain manner. 
 
 Shall we say then that if there are people "morally 
 deaf" they have no duties? In the ethical, or internal, 
 sense they have none ; but they may be under the obli- 
 gation of acting as if they recognised at least those grosser 
 moral values that are susceptible of being presented by 
 external coercion as motives appreciable even by a 
 consciousness non-moral. Now this obligation necessarily 
 implies the reference to a superior power distinct from the 
 individual will. As this power imposes itself in view of 
 an end and in agreement with certain norms, it is con- 
 ceived as the power of a Will [of the State or of the 
 Deity] that commands the observance of those norms. 
 Evidently, however, this would not suffice to give a 
 reason for duty as internal obligation, even if, by tracing 
 it to its origin, it explained the formation of the sense of 
 duty. 
 
 Yet, since the moral will manifests itself as the 
 requirement of the constant subordination of motives 
 antagonistic to morality, it reacts in the form of approval 
 of the external coercive power which by its "sanctions" 
 represses those motives. Thus the power that deserves 
 respect is distinguished from the constringent force that 
 merely has to be submitted to. The command may be 
 limited to a certain sphere of moral values [command of 
 the State], or it may coincide with the moral value itself
 
 74 THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA [CH. 
 
 [command of the Deity]. In either case, the difEerence 
 remains between the attitude of the moral and the non- 
 moral consciousness. For the first, it is the moral valua- 
 tion that causes the obligation to be recognised and 
 respected. For the second, it is the obligation that 
 causes moral values to be recognised: the observance of 
 the obligation is not internal morality, but external 
 conformity to certain commands that are worth just as 
 much as the sanction that accompanies them is worth. 
 
 If the distinction between command and valuation 
 is not overcome even when the two terms are unified in 
 the conception of an authority at once irresistibly powerful 
 and indefectibly moral, the more manifestly will it subsist 
 in all other forms of sanction. There remain, however, 
 at least in appearance, two ways of evading the con- 
 clusion : either to deny all value to the moral consciousness 
 as such, and to found every valuation on the power 
 that posits it at its good pleasure; or to transfer the 
 criterion of moral valuation from the personal conscious- 
 ness to some other consciousness, impersonal or collective. 
 
 Now the first thesis either fails to answer the question 
 it purports to answer, since to deny all value to the moral 
 valuation is not to say whence its authority comes; or 
 it takes away only in words the distinction, which returns 
 through every subtlety, between justice and arbitrary 
 will. When the Platonic Callicles condemns the laws as 
 an imposition by the foohsh and weak many on the clever 
 and strong few, his blame implies a moral criterion 
 superior to force ; for he thinks it unjust that the actually 
 predominant force should overrule the force that ought to 
 prevail. And in the absolutism of Hobbes, the unlimited 
 power of the sovereign excludes the moral valuation only
 
 V] THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA 75 
 
 in appearance ; the reason for submission to its arbitrary 
 will being that a bad law is better than no law and a 
 tyrannical government than no government. 
 
 Of the second thesis, all the forms fail to give anything 
 different from the personal consciousness, to which the 
 authority of the collective consciousness is always re- 
 ducible. For this has no expression except in the person 
 as an individual manifestation of the social consciousness ; 
 which indeed only exists in the individual, the ends of 
 society being such only in so far as they are made such 
 by individual persons. Since it is in individual persons 
 that society becomes conscious, moral values are moral 
 only in so far as they are estimated by the personal 
 consciousness. From the ethical point of view, it is not 
 society that gives value to my moral criterion, but my 
 moral criterion that gives value to society. It is to the 
 ethical judgment of the individual that every social reform 
 appeals, including that which calls itself Socialism. The 
 faith which gives itself that name is in fact a moral ideal 
 having for centre the individual. Collective property 
 (whatever might be its actual effects) is aimed at as a 
 necessary condition for rendering effective the liberty of 
 all, for making of each human individual a true human 
 person. 
 
 The subtle and comphcated doctrine which makes the 
 State the centre of all moral authority has in part been 
 dealt with in the discussion of the doctrines that find the 
 supreme authority in History or in Power. So far as it 
 occupies a distinct place, the decisive point is this : that 
 the ethical value of the State, even if we assume it to be 
 the ideal State, arises from its being the only adequate 
 organ of the universal ethical will that becomes aware of
 
 76 THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA [CH. 
 
 itself as valid in the personal consciousness. Thus in 
 the rational order the knowledge of the value of the 
 State is derivative. 
 
 5. Inversion of the Problems relative to the Foundation 
 of Morality. Every efiort to derive a moral valuation 
 from something of which the moral value is not already 
 recognised is therefore vain or illusory. Either it does 
 not give what is sought, or it presupposes what its claim 
 is to found. Thus the preceding discussions point to an 
 inversion of the problems. The question is no longer 
 to find the reason of moral values in the reality we know, 
 but to discover whether it is possible to affirm a system 
 of realities in correspondence with the order of moral 
 values ; not to fix those values by relation to happiness as 
 an end, but to determine whether happiness is ultimately 
 attainable only by morality; not to educe them from 
 history, but to learn whether history can be read as the 
 realisation of a moral process ; not to posit them in 
 relation to what a Will imposes, but to ascertain whether 
 the postulate of a Will that imposes them can be theo- 
 retically upheld. In any case, the primacy and inde- 
 pendence of moral values remains clearly established. 
 
 II. 
 
 The Plurality of the Moral Criteria. 
 
 1. Kanfs Formal Criterion of Valuation. The inde- 
 pendence of moral values and the impossibility of deducing 
 them from any theoretical speculation was recognised and 
 affirmed in the most expUcit manner by Kant. To 
 avoid confusion, however, it must be pointed out that
 
 V] THE SOLUTION OF JU YALTA 77 
 
 this recognition of the independence of ethics does not 
 necessarily imply acceptance of the principles and methods 
 of Kant's ethical philosophy. 
 
 Mere universality of form in ethical legislation can by 
 itself give no content. Reason is only a principle of 
 consistency, theoretical or practical, and yields no direct, 
 as distinguished from derivative, moral values. The 
 "law of the stronger," for example, if taken in a certain 
 sense, is quite reconcilable with Kant's categorical im- 
 perative. If indeed I subjugate others to my arbitrary 
 will when I am stronger, and then cry out because I am 
 myself subjugated when I am weaker, I contradict the 
 precept. So to act that I can will that my maxim should 
 at the same time be made law universal; but if force 
 is in truth to me the highest thing, and I do not complain 
 when I am in turn subdued, there is no contradiction 
 of the rule of universality. Kant's more fecund formula, 
 Act so as to treat humanity, whether in thy own person 
 or in that of another, always at the same time as an 
 end and never merely as a means, has this character of 
 fecundity only in so far as it gives a content to the uni- 
 versal; and this content is assumed, not deduced. 
 
 Pure Reason, we perceive, as the mere requirement of 
 coherence, does not tell us what moral values are; and 
 we get no more hght from the Kantian conceptions of the 
 Pure Will and the Good Will. Pure will, autonomous wall, 
 will devoid of every impulse of sensibiHty, can be nothing 
 but the will that Reason wills, reason itself in so far as 
 practical, in so far as legislative form ; and it gives only 
 this same universality. The conception of the good will 
 adds indeed obligation (action from duty) to universality 
 (respect for law as law); but this has reference only to
 
 78 THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA [CH. 
 
 the case of conflict between respect for the moral law on 
 the one side and the impulses that oppose it on the other. 
 To tell us that it is obHgatory to act in accordance with 
 the moral law is not to tell us what the moral law is. 
 
 If respect for humanity, or for the human person, as 
 an end in itself, is understood, as it was by Kant, of the 
 rational person, the question remains, whether it is merely 
 the universal reason in each person that is the object of 
 respect, or each personality also in its difference from 
 others. 
 
 Only on condition that we conceive the personality 
 as comprising indeed but not exhausting itself in reason, 
 do we get any real content. With nothing but the 
 universally legislative reason to respect in each, clearly, as 
 before, we do not get beyond the form. Respect for the 
 human spirit in the entirety of its manifestations cannot 
 be derived from respect for reason as reason and for law 
 because it is law. 
 
 From Kant's ow^n illustrations it is manifest that the 
 reduction of the criterion of moral valuation to a purely 
 formal criterion supposes the ends of moral action already 
 known as to their content; duties already known and 
 determined as to their object. An answer is given to the 
 question. When is the intention of the action truly good, 
 w^hen is an act truly moral? but not to the question. 
 What are the actions into which this good will ought to 
 translate itself, what are the ends to which the good wall 
 ought to turn? In short, the question is not answered. 
 What are the values in the effecting of which with purity 
 of will morality consists? 
 
 The answer is in fact given by the moral conscience. 
 But what if the answer were equivocal ? Suppose that in
 
 V] THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA 79 
 
 two consciences there is equal respect for the moral law, 
 but that the law commands to one what it forbids or does 
 not command to the other. Is the opposition got rid of 
 by the knowledge that the will is good when it is deter- 
 mined by respect for the law, and that morality consists 
 in fulfiUing duty for duty's sake? 
 
 2. The Diversity of the Moral Criteria. There are in 
 truth as many moral consciences as there are personal 
 consciences in which certain values are recognised as 
 supreme and normative and vaHd independently of the 
 momentary and variable flux of transitory and accidental 
 valuations; and as valid alike for one's own judgment 
 and will and for the judgment and will of others. The 
 singular fascination exercised by the ethics of Kant 
 comes not from the formahsm in itself, but from the 
 faith that beneath the form there is only one content, 
 the same for all consciences that are moral. All efi'orts 
 to prove this, however, are vain. The demand of reason 
 for coherence in the sense of consistency can indeed be 
 rigorously maintained ; but it is an illusion to think that 
 rationahty by itself suffices to distinguish values from 
 non-values, moral values from non-moral values; that 
 it can make us recognise the value of any object, ideal 
 or real, without recurrence, direct or indirect, to some 
 non-rational datum or postulate. 
 
 To take examples : the devotee of money, the devotee 
 of art, the devotee of knowledge, can all regulate their 
 thoughts and actions with equal rationality by applying 
 consistently to their own lives and to those of others 
 their own estimate of the highest good. And, while 
 moral values, as has been shown, cannot be reduced to 
 heterogeneous values, — hedonistic (egoistic or altruistic),
 
 80 THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA [CH. 
 
 noetic, aesthetic or religious, — yet all the modes of life 
 connected with these various values do in fact take upon 
 themselves an ethical form; the dominant value being 
 applied universally as a test. 
 
 At the same time, diverse as they are, they all re- 
 cognise, though in subordination to their supreme end, 
 certain moral virtues commonly so-called, such as tem- 
 perance, force of will, veracity^. So again, the man whose 
 distinctive interest is moral, the homo ethicus, has to 
 recognise in artistic, rehgious, intellectual, economic values 
 a direct or indirect moral value. Further, applying the 
 consideration of "organic value" felicitously brought out 
 by G. E, Moore {Ethics, chap. vii. p. 246), viz., that "the 
 amount by which the value of a whole exceeds that of 
 one of its factors is not necessarily equal to that of the 
 remaining factor," we find that the ideal object of the moral 
 valuation may acquire a greater value when knowledge 
 or sense of beauty is added, though these are regarded as 
 in themselves diverse interests^. It is not without sig- 
 nificance that the highest good has been identified with 
 the highest truth and the highest beauty. Moreover, the 
 
 ^ This observation reappears in the next section in a more generalised 
 aspect. 
 
 ^ Cf. Moore, Ethics, p. 247 : "Whatever single kind of thing may be 
 proposed as a measure of intrinsic value, instead of pleasure — whether 
 knowledge, or virtue, or wisdom, or love — it is, I think, quite plain that 
 it is not such a measure ; because it is quite plain that, however valuable 
 any one of these things may be, we may always add to the value of a 
 whole which contains any one of them, not only by adding more of that 
 one, but also by adding something else instead.''^ 
 
 A particular case of "organic value" is stated by Hume in the 
 Treatise of Human Nature, Book n, Part iii, sect. 10, "Of curiosity, or 
 the love of truth," where he shows how the addition of even a small 
 degree of philanthropy makes an immense difference to the love of 
 truth as a passion.
 
 V] THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA 81 
 
 consciousness of the homo ethicus, coming to recognise in 
 morality the internal notes of spontaneity, liberty, au- 
 tonomy, as distinguished from mere external conformity, 
 is led to extend the intrinsic dignity of moral values to 
 the other spiritual values also which have these notes. 
 
 Thus the present situation is that, for the general 
 uniformity of content that prevailed in European morals 
 approximately from the triumph of Christian ethics^ to 
 Kant, there has substituted itself a variety of systems 
 recognising different criteria of value. The systems 
 differ not, as before, by proposing different foundations 
 for a common content, but by expressing, perhaps in 
 their larger or more significant part, a diversity of con- 
 trasting contents. And the common content still re- 
 cognised has for the personal conscience no greater 
 authority in itself than that of the content marking out 
 the particular system. There seems no issue then unless 
 the conscience itself can or must recognise, without 
 abandoning its own criterion of valuation, some difference, 
 if not of kind then of degree, between one valuation and 
 another. 
 
 3. Conditionality in the Moral Values. Let us make 
 the improbable supposition that the philanthropic, the 
 speculative, the religious, the aesthetic spirit, recognise 
 no values at all save those that can be measured by the 
 criteria of their own ideal ends. Even so, it will be 
 
 ^ This means, more generally, the ethics of later antiquity, pre- 
 dominantly Stoic, which largely passed over into Christianity. The 
 political conditions of the ethical modifications noted by Juvalta were 
 the transition from the city-State, with its vigorous self-affirmation of 
 diverse types, to the uniformity of an imperial civilisation, and then 
 the return, after the dissolution of this, to varieties based in independent 
 but interacting new nationalities. 
 
 W. E. 6
 
 82 THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA [CH. 
 
 found that certain endowments, for example, promptitude, 
 tenacity, self-control, courage, are and must be considered 
 as values by all the types without distinction ; because 
 all, if they are intelligent, must recognise in these personal 
 qualities conditions either indispensable or extremely 
 useful for the reaUsation of the order of values peculiar 
 to each. For the same reason, it vnll be found also that 
 respect for the inviolableness and liberty of the person, 
 observance of contracts, exchange of services, and the 
 customs, institutions, laws and dispositions of spirit con- 
 nected with them, such as probity, impartiality, sympathy, 
 must be recognised as values. All the types therefore 
 will be led to recognise and appreciate in themselves and 
 others — abstraction made of every moral valuation — 
 values personal and social that arise out of this relation 
 of conditionality with respect to all alike. Since this is 
 a necessary and permanent relation, each of the types 
 must recognise in such values a certain precedence over 
 the direct and final values that depend on them. 
 
 We arrive thus at the distinction between those con- 
 ditioning values for which every conscience can recognise 
 as legitimate an external legislation imposing them, and 
 the final values of which an external legislation ought 
 merely not to exclude the possibility. For the former 
 are conditions for all, while the latter are, by the hypo- 
 thesis, values each only for its own type^. 
 
 The examples adduced so far do not, however, corre- 
 spond to a rigorous determination. If we try to fix with 
 precision the values that make up this common content, 
 we shall find that they are summed up in two conditions 
 
 ^ The very exclusiveness of each type is thus made to compel 
 generality if they are to live under a common system.
 
 V] THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA 83 
 
 recognised in effect as primary fundamental values by 
 every moral system: namely, liberty and justice. These 
 conditions emerge when each type — the philanthropist, 
 the speculative inquirer, the mystic, the artist — recognises 
 both that it cannot carry its positive imperative beyond 
 the common values and that it must not deny the orders 
 of value that give direction to the other modes of life; 
 that none is entitled to impose its peculiar criterion on 
 the others as the ultimate test. 
 
 To bring to actuality in oneself and in every other 
 person these values of liberty and justice, and the values 
 implicit in them, must be recognised as a duty universally 
 valid ; or rather as the only duty, or the only category of 
 duties, truly universal. 
 
 But liberty is not a condition that exists in fact, a 
 given possession; it is a conquest to be made, an ideal 
 that requires ever new efforts and imposes ever new 
 duties. And the same is to be said of justice, which is 
 the social mirror of liberty. Also, since liberty and 
 justice have been deduced here as indirect values, there 
 remains always the possibility of a conflict between a 
 direct interest such as that of knowledge or beauty or 
 sympathy, and the mediate and indirect duties of liberty 
 and justice ; or, in general terms, between the final values 
 that are supreme for the individual consciousness and 
 the values that appear to it only instrumental. 
 
 4. The Presupposition of every Moral Valuation, and 
 the Fundamental Opposition of the Criteria. Liberty and 
 justice, however, are not merely indirect moral values, 
 but also values for themselves. To recognise the supreme 
 value, for each, of an end or ideal subordinating all other 
 values and giving a constant direction to the will, is to 
 
 6—2
 
 84 THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA [CH. 
 
 recognise the supreme value of that which constitutes the 
 personal unity. Now this implies the absolute value of 
 the human person; for if the personality had no value, 
 the ends and ideals in which it is centred could have 
 none. 
 
 This intrinsic and absolute value of the person in 
 itself is the implicit presupposition, the postulate under- 
 stood in every moral valuation. All discussion on its 
 legitimacy is vain, or rather self- contradictory. By this 
 presupposition, it is imposed on me that I should be a 
 person and should will that every human being should be 
 a person ; and not merely a human person as rational 
 being in general, but this particular person. Distinctive 
 personality, expressing itself in an ideal, coincides with 
 liberty in the positive sense. The recognition of its value 
 in others is the demand of justice^. 
 
 The proof that the end chosen is the end of a coherent 
 personal will and not a mere caprice of the transitory 
 and mutable ego is the readiness for sacrifice. The value 
 of life is measured by the value of that to which one is 
 ready to sacrifice it. 
 
 The moral value of the particular content of the will 
 springs from its being the means by which the absolute 
 value of human personality expresses itself in the in- 
 dividual consciousness. Thus the ideal in which the 
 criterion or the law of moral valuation embodies itself for 
 the conscience of individual persons constitutes for each 
 the affirmation of the spiritual unity of its will to be a 
 person, of its liberty. And so liberty, which before 
 
 1 These two points, not stated here by Juvalta in so many words, 
 but formulated below, seem to me to constitute the nerve of the 
 a rgument.
 
 V] THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA 85 
 
 appeared only as a common condition for actualising every 
 order of values, becomes here a value by itself immediately 
 universal and at the same time proper to the individual 
 The imperative of hberty is at once: Be a person, and 
 Be thyself; Respect humanity, and Respect in thyself 
 and in all others the individual and concrete expression 
 of humanity. 
 
 This does not mean of course that there is a duty to 
 be original as well as to be just; though each personality 
 has its shade of difference that should aim at expression. 
 The individual differences, however, group themselves 
 around certain types, and hence arise necessary oppo- 
 sitions. The fundamental form of opposition, which 
 criticism can only establish and not get rid of, is the out- 
 come of the contrast between the universal moral values — 
 the values of liberty^ and justice — and those that have 
 supreme value for the individual consciousness. Briefly, 
 the antithesis is between the values of justice and the 
 values of culture; between the requirement that each 
 should be or should have the power to become a person, 
 that is, a free, conscious and coherent w^ll, and the re- 
 quirement that he who is already a person, that is to say, 
 who has the consciousness of his duty and power to make 
 himself free, should augment and enrich himself by new 
 values. It is the antithesis between number and quality, 
 between extension and intensity; between the duty of 
 rendering those participators in the values of liberty who 
 are not already participators, and the duty of increasing 
 in those who already possess them the values of culture, 
 
 ^ Here of course liberty means the equal liberty of others, not the 
 liberty of the particular personality in question, which is identical with 
 the effort towards its own ideal end.
 
 86 THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA [CH. 
 
 which are, at least mediately, an increment in the values 
 of hberty. 
 
 Are the two paths convergent ? Let us hope that they 
 are ; but at present the question is to determine which is 
 the predominant moral requirement: the increase of a 
 culture from which most of those who are its necessary 
 instruments are excluded, or the removal or diminution 
 of this exclusion. 
 
 To say that the culture of the few is necessarily the 
 elevation of all, or that the elevation of all is necessarily 
 increase of culture, is to delude oneself with words; it 
 is to repeat in another strain of optimism the old-fashioned 
 coincidences of the general good with the individual good. 
 Saying so does not make it so. 
 
 5. The Relations of Morals to Politics and Religion. 
 Pohtically an opposition of tendencies displays itself in 
 different conceptions of the justice constitutive of the 
 State. To the universal moral values corresponds an 
 obligation at once external and internal ; to the properly 
 personal moral values, an obhgation only internal. This 
 is the general position, determined by the ideal that the 
 State, considered ethically, has to realise; but there are 
 different views as to the precise character of the justice 
 that should fix and preserve the conditions necessary for 
 the liberty of all. Thus we find the interest of diversity 
 defended by a relatively conservative Liberalism; while 
 strictly equal external possibilities for all to become 
 persons are championed by that which is wrongly called 
 Socialism, but would rightly be described as Universalistic 
 Individualism. Under the actual conditions, this differ- 
 ence issues in a conflict juridical in form and economic in 
 substance.
 
 V] THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA 87 
 
 Now it is to be noted that if for the contest of higher 
 interests (noetic, aesthetic, rehgious or altruistic) so far 
 considered, we substitute interests of egoistic hedonism, 
 we arrive at precisely the same universal values of liberty 
 and justice ; provided only that the egoist will rationalise 
 his egoism, that is to say, will recognise that in the same 
 conditions the same criterion of valuation is admissible 
 for all. And in fact we find that pohtical liberahsm, in 
 its purely political, that is, external aspect, is modelled 
 on the conception of economic freedom. This only in 
 appearance contradicts the thesis that a value cannot be 
 normative unless considered as distinct from the tran- 
 sitory and variable desires of the subject; for the value 
 contemplated by economics is not pleasure, or subjective 
 satisfaction, but wealth, which is a common term of 
 reference for all hedonistic values, being the instrument 
 for attaining them in general. So far as method is 
 concerned, the norms of justice can be most simply 
 deduced from the egoistic conflict formulated in economic 
 terms. 
 
 Hence follow two corollaries. The first is that the 
 political power, so far as coercive, that is, acting by 
 sanctions and therefore appealing to egoistic motives, is 
 not in itself an organ of morality : political institutions 
 are moral or immoral only as inwardly estimated by 
 the individual conscience. The second is that, since the 
 juridical order has to justify itself from an egoistic point 
 of view, it must consider the higher goods first only 
 as hedonistically desirable. Having thus brought them 
 under the class of values desired for the sake of hedonistic 
 satisfaction, it can then proceed to fulfil its ethical or 
 educative function, which is to promote culture by
 
 88 THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA [CH. 
 
 preparing the conditions necessary for rising to the effort 
 after these higher goods. 
 
 When the State is considered in relation to other 
 States, it assumes the nature and function of a Person 
 among Persons. Here we come upon an antinomy in 
 the relations of the citizen and the State, according as 
 the State is considered in its internal action or in its 
 external conduct. In the former relation, the poHtical 
 Power is from the ethical point of view the means and 
 the single person the end; in the latter, the State is end 
 and the citizen means. The political parties that consider 
 the opposition of States as insuperable and the sovereignty 
 of each State as ethically unconditioned tend to make the 
 second order of conceptions prevail. Those that beheve 
 that the opposition can be overcome and that the 
 sovereignty of States in their mutual relations is ethically 
 conditioned manifest the opposite tendency. 
 
 The individual modes of life directed by an ideal 
 have a resemblance to a personal religion; and, if we 
 conceive the moral ideal as realised in a Being whom we 
 call God, our devotion to the ideal becomes actually 
 religion. There is consequently a certain analogy between 
 the relations of morals to reUgion and to politics. The 
 political Power realises the external conditions of morality ; 
 the divine Virtue, conceived as the spring of all ideals, 
 realises the internal conditions. Since the realising of the 
 moral value in action consists essentially in an act of will, 
 which is internal and spiritual, and material and external 
 conformity derives its value from that, the pohtical 
 Power may then appear to the rehgious conscience as if 
 it were the means and instrument of the rehgious Power. 
 This view, however, is corrected for the rehgious
 
 V] THE SOLUTION OF JUVALTA 89 
 
 conscience itself when it is brought to recognise that the 
 external legislation finds its justification in that same 
 fundamental ethical requirement in the name of which 
 the conscience recognises the supreme value of its own 
 ideal and the divine authority of the Power in which it 
 is fully realised. The requirement consists in respect for 
 the human person as the spring of all ethical value ; and 
 impUes that hberty which conscience cannot deny to 
 another without making its ov\-n liberty an object of 
 contempt. 
 
 This separation of the political Power and of external 
 legislation from every particular rehgious faith, is from 
 an objective point of view not less inevitable than its 
 independence, already noted, of every particular ideal 
 that presents itself as moral. For the certitude of every 
 religious faith is a psychological certitude in the person 
 holding it. But to recognise this inward and personal 
 character by which a faith is at once indemonstrable and 
 beyond the reach of external criticism, does not strip the 
 various faiths and ideals of the tendency to deny and 
 exclude their opposites. This very diversity of valuations, 
 each claiming universal validity, is the source of all 
 increase of culture and of all spiritual elevation. It is 
 the values for which the pohtical Power stands, the 
 universal moral values of liberty and justice, that impose 
 limits on the conflict. In relation to the dignity of man, 
 which consists in the affirmation of his spiritual aims, 
 liberty comes before life. Liberum esse hominem est 
 necesse; vivere non est necesse.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS 
 
 The advance of Juvalta's ethical doctrine on Kant's 
 seems to me to be twofold. On the one side he reaches 
 a higher degree of abstraction, clearing the idea of moral 
 law even in appearance from all association with external 
 command. On the other side he more expressly recognises 
 the necessarily empirical character of all ends. What is 
 still needed is the recognition that the doctrine founded 
 is not, even potentially, the whole of ethics according to 
 the historical conception of ethical philosophy, but ethics 
 in a certain aspect ; Abstract Ethics as distinguished from 
 the Art of Life in general. From this again, if we regard 
 Abstract Ethics as an existent doctrine, we must dis- 
 tinguish AppHed or Concrete Ethics, which is the Art of 
 Life in so far as considerations of Abstract Ethics deter- 
 mine modifications in actual conduct. By these dis- 
 tinctions (recapitulated from Chapter III) the objections 
 that might be raised to the incompleteness of the guidance 
 offered towards human good are met beforehand. We 
 perceive that this in its fullness is an affair of innumerable 
 sciences and arts, each to be pursued by its own adepts; 
 and that ethics proper, as has been said, is no more than 
 a kind of logic of conduct. This cannot enter into all 
 the detail of what we ought to do, any more than a
 
 CH. Vl] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS 91 
 
 text-book of logic can properly become an encyclopaedia 
 of human knowledge. 
 
 Concrete Ethics, as it has existed historically, is a 
 fluctuating subject. What is most conspicuous in the 
 classical works on ethics is the extreme variety and the 
 mixture of points of view. Since in principle the whole 
 Art of Life was included, and the Hmited doctrine called 
 Abstract Ethics was not usually distinguished under a 
 special name from the rest, there had to be selection 
 from an infinite subject-matter. This has been more or 
 less arbitrary, and often determined in later times merely 
 by the established tradition of discussing certain things 
 and not others. One method of selection, which was 
 especially that of antiquity, is, under the direction of 
 a certain end conceived as the highest good, to map out 
 a mode of life for philosophers. Here especially we see 
 the resemblance to religion, noted by Juvalta, of any life 
 according to an ideal. There is no more conspicuous 
 example of this than Epicureanism as presented by 
 Lucretius at the opening of his sixth Book. Epicurus is 
 celebrated as the Teacher of all truth — 
 
 Cuius et extincti propter divina reperta 
 Divulgata vetus iam ad caelum gloria fertur, 
 
 who found mortals, after they had attained all material 
 goods, suffering inwardly from the sense of sin, and showed 
 them the narrow way that leads to the highest good : 
 
 Veridicis igitur purgavit pectora dictis, 
 Et finem statuit cuppedinis atque timoris; 
 Exposuitque bonum summum, quo tendimus omnes, 
 Quid foret, atque viam monstravit, tramite parvo 
 Qua possemus ad id recto contendere cursu. 
 
 But this good, though the good of all, it is clearly
 
 92 ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS [CH. 
 
 seen, will be sought only by a few. And so approxi- 
 mations to it are usually admitted; as indeed also by 
 religious teachers, who, recognising that the mass of 
 mankind will not attain sanctity, yet have something to 
 say to them. Thus with the Stoics there is the possibihty 
 of making progress to an end perhaps unattainable; 
 with the Neo-Platonists there are the civic virtues for 
 those who cannot reach intellectual vision or mystical 
 ecstasy; and, long after, Spinoza renews this last dis- 
 tinction in another form. 
 
 Now it is interesting that Comte and Mill, pre- 
 eminently teachers who ground themselves upon ex- 
 perience, and at the same time seekers of a good for all, 
 have more in common with this attitude of primary 
 appeal to an exceptional few than teachers like Spencer^ 
 or even Kant, whose bias is to abstract deduction. 
 Spencer in particular seems to have regarded philosophy 
 simply as a profession or employment like any other, 
 which merely happened to be his own. Thus we arrive 
 at the result, perhaps unexpected, yet, it seems to me, 
 quite prepared for and explained by Juvalta, that the 
 doctrines of the end or of the good are more esoteric than 
 the doctrines of law. This is as it should be if the good 
 for different types is various. Abstract ethics then be- 
 comes a kind of impersonal science of the conditions under 
 which all the types are bound to live in common. And 
 the variety of the types is of course not exhausted in 
 the philosophic systems of morals. It must be recognised, 
 
 ^ Of all the great English experientialists, Spencer, it is generally- 
 recognised, comes nearest to philosophic rationalism. And as, in 
 common with Hobbes, he had a stronger system-building impulse than 
 the others, so also he is to be classed with Hobbes in so far as he at least 
 attempted a doctrine of Abstract Ethics.
 
 Vl] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS 93 
 
 on the same general principles of liberty and justice, 
 that the artist, the man of letters, the pohtician, the man 
 of the world, the man of business, are all entitled to their 
 own manuals of conduct. But evidently none of these 
 could become manuals for schools; and no more can 
 ethical doctrines of the good. To follow with intelligence 
 discriminations among the kinds of goods requires re- 
 latively mature experience. To follow the outhnes of a 
 fairly easy abstract deduction does not. Hence, apart 
 from its interest among the philosophical sciences, the 
 special province reserved for abstract ethics seems to be 
 that of furnishing the basis for moral education under the 
 conditions of the modern State. This was very clearly 
 perceived by Renouvier, who, from the starting-point of 
 his own Kantianism, went some way towards fulfilling 
 the demand for a popular and teachable doctrine. That 
 Comte's or Mill's doctrine could not equally well have 
 furnished this basis ought to be evident at a glance. 
 It is precisely the abstract character of the moral law 
 that adapts it to be taught first, hke geometry in a 
 scientific curriculum. And the doctrine of the good, 
 apart from the theoretical objection to it if it claims to 
 estabhsh by itself the supreme norms of conduct, cannot 
 be made an affair of abstract deduction. Nor can it, of 
 course, like the beginnings of the physical sciences, be 
 made an afiair of easy experiment. 
 
 Renouvier's contention, that no doctrine of the good, 
 however elevated, can, in the absence of a priori principles 
 of justice, make liberty secure, must I think be admitted^. 
 
 1 This means that I no longer regard my own attempt, in a short 
 paper entitled "The Theory of Justice" (Mind, N.S. iv. 99), to find an 
 experiential and evolutionary basis, as pointing the way to an adequate 
 ethical as distinguished from political solution.
 
 94 ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS [CH. 
 
 It is noteworthy that the ultimate fault which he finds 
 in the system of Hobbes is not the egoism in itself, but 
 the theoretical subordination of the law placed over the 
 individual to an end for the sake of which the law exists. 
 That this end is only the individual's own good is not the 
 essential fault, but that it is in the last resort above the 
 law. Thus the moralists who, against the egoism and 
 individualism postulated by Hobbes, have brought out 
 the sympathetic and social factors in morality have quite 
 failed to establish the essentials of ethics on a sounder 
 basis, great as may have been the value of their work 
 in detail. This high opinion of the merits of Hobbes's 
 solution is quite confirmed by the new development of 
 Juvalta, whose method resembles that of Hobbes in so 
 far as he estabHshes the necessity of the moral law by 
 postulating a conflict about goods. Where he differs is in 
 beginning with the goods that are the distinctive ends of 
 culture, instead of formulating all, as Hobbes did, in terms 
 of a conflict for power. The more primitive conflict, 
 however, as we have seen, he brings in at the end in 
 touching upon the relation between morals and pohtics; 
 and he finds the result exactly the same. For higher and 
 lower oppositions ahke, the law of justice emerges as 
 reciprocal recognition of rights to self-affirmation. The 
 value of his new method is in showing with special clear- 
 ness how illusory it would be to imagine that because 
 in our psychology we have transcended egoism and 
 individualism we are straightway in agreement about a 
 common good. Nothing, as he shows, has done more 
 to make a definite moral rule necessary than the increased 
 richness of modern life in disinterested ends. For each 
 of these, by itself, tends to denial of the others. The
 
 Vl] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS 95 
 
 most apparently disinterested of all, that of direct al- 
 truism in pursuit of the common good, as Renouvier had 
 already pointed out, does not escape the danger, too clear 
 in the case of Plato and Comte, of setting up a social 
 despotism of hierarchs and experts. For if in truth ethics 
 is an affair of discovering the means to an incontestable 
 final good, who should be more competent to govern than 
 those who know? 
 
 Of course it is an error on the other side to suppose 
 that, when once we have our formulae of rights and 
 justice, all problems can be straightway solved wnth a 
 modicum of good will. This has been the error of 
 revolutionists — an error certainly not too little insisted 
 on in the century that succeeded the revolutionary age. 
 My exposition of the Itahan thinker must, however, have 
 made it clear that from this error he is entirely free. 
 No one could more fully recognise that there is no ready- 
 made solution of anything, and that, especially in pohtics, 
 we have to go by degrees and to work by compromise. 
 We may regret that the kind of Rationalism we can accept 
 does not give us quasi-mathematical formulae to be apphed 
 with confidence to all cases by logical deduction ; but we 
 all admit that it does not. And yet we must insist that 
 the old formulae were attempts to express eternal principles 
 that can never again pass wholly out of view. 
 
 Whatever varying expression they may find, the 
 principles of "eternal and immutable morahty" form the 
 subject of Abstract Ethics. It is conceivable, though 
 quite remote from the facts, that these might have no 
 apphcation in the actual world. This supposition would 
 be reahsed if there were no active relations among persons ; 
 if each person could pursue his own good without the
 
 96 ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS [CH. 
 
 least chance of hindering or helping, or being helped or 
 hindered by, any one else. In that case, the condition of 
 rational action would be simply to construct a scale of 
 goods. The term "justice," if used at all, might be used 
 in the sense suggested by Plato, namely, the performance 
 of its own function by each part of the soul in the relation 
 towards the other functions necessary for the best in- 
 ternal life. Abstract Ethics, or the theory of justice in 
 society and the State, might then be thought out as a 
 subject of intellectual curiosity about what ought to exist 
 if mutual interferences were possible by persons seeking 
 their own good. Its existence would be entirely in an 
 ideal world. But clearly this ideal world, that could be 
 imagined for pastime by self-evolving intellectual monads, 
 is our actual world. A world in which there would be no 
 need for anything but an Art of Life to construct a scale 
 of goods is more remote from all that we know than the 
 world of Abstract Ethics. This therefore, in spite of all 
 difficulty in applying it, is that which gives its practical 
 bearing to the study of moral philosophy. 
 
 But of what nature is the application in a world where 
 there is at once co-operation and conflict ? This has been 
 partly determined already. On our present view, it is 
 clearer than ever that we cannot work downwards from 
 abstract ethics to all the detail, constructing the moral 
 life as we go on from first principles. The application of 
 abstract ethics is to a life of the pursuit of ends that may 
 be arranged in a scale of goods, but certainly difier for 
 different persons and have fluctuating relations for the 
 same person. On this complex that it did not and cannot 
 create, the ethical norm has to impose limits; and these 
 limits are perceived, when considered, to be strictly
 
 Vl] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS 97 
 
 obligatory. But clearly, on this view, it would be quite 
 wrong to take as our ever-present aim simply to be moral 
 in the sense of conforming to the moral law. For what is 
 creative in life we must appeal to the principle of love in 
 the widest sense, and this is spontaneous. It is this, 
 psychologically, that must normally give us the impulse 
 even to be just; but, as justice does not determine our 
 positive ends, so love does not determine the hmit and the 
 obhgation^. Complete unification is therefore impossible ; 
 and yet there are not two worlds standing apart. Between 
 ends or goods on the one side and law on the other, there 
 is an intermediate doctrine — or rather there are doctrines 
 — of Concrete Ethics, varying from age to age. 
 
 By way of illustration, I propose to discuss a few 
 questions of Concrete or Applied Ethics. If the results 
 have no particular symmetry, this ought perhaps to be, 
 as Mr Moore said of some examples in Principia Ethica, 
 a commendation of them to those who are suspicious of 
 abstract doctrine. 
 
 First, what shall we say of the productive and de- 
 structive arts that go under the collective names of 
 Industrialism and Militarism? Obviously these are in 
 the main an affair of knowledge and skill working with a 
 view to ends under tacitly understood conventions. None 
 of them could be called in themselves branches of ethics, 
 and yet they fill a very large portion of life. The part 
 
 ^ That is why Kant insisted so strongly that duty, in the moral 
 ideal, must be able to subsist independently of affections. He did not 
 mean, as was sometimes supposed, that a right action done without 
 affection or with repugnance is more meritorious for that reason; but 
 simply that a right action is that which is done, and would be done 
 with intention, because it is objectively right, whatever the agent's 
 feelings might be. 
 
 W. E. 7
 
 98 ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS [CH. 
 
 assignable to them is probably under modern conditions 
 not less than the "three- fourths," if it does not amount 
 to the "nine- tenths," once assigned to "conduct." Is 
 there then any moral rule generally apphcable to them? 
 Some might say that obviously "efficiency" is the supreme 
 rule ; but this seems to me, if we are thinking in relation 
 to a permanent social ideal, more than doubtful. The 
 moral rule, consisting in some refinement of justice, 
 would probably apply to them the maxims of the mean 
 and of "nothing too much." Aristotle, from the point 
 of view of the end or the good, discountenanced over- 
 speciaHsm in the acquirement of technical accomplish- 
 ments, because this was inconsistent with the ideal of 
 the "all-round" man, such as a freeman should desire to 
 become. The same general position might be deduced 
 from the rule of abstract ethics. By that rule, we try to 
 avoid doing in the society of others what we should not 
 wish others to do. Now clearly if every one is to strain > 
 after the utmost degree of accompUshment in the hghter 
 things, the amenity of life will be reduced for all. Thus 
 the application of the rule will be, to leave some margin 
 of power unused; and therefore it seems not altogether 
 a blameable form of affectation to affect to do things 
 easily. In an ideal social order it seems to me that this 
 would be carried over to the useful arts. The pursuit 
 of too great efficiency would be avoided in order to leave 
 a reserve of vitahty for leisure. Here, we are directly 
 considering the end; but the rule of justice is plainly 
 applicable in the form of the Kantian maxim, not to treat 
 oneself or others as a mere means. For how can any one 
 be treated more as a mere means than by the employment 
 of all his strength in the practice of some useful art ?
 
 Vl] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS 99 
 
 Of course, as in all things, the existence of a state of 
 declared war modifies the rule. Efficiency then has to 
 become dominant, especially if the enemy has cultivated 
 it both in military and industrial affairs to the highest 
 point. But again, when we turn our thoughts to the 
 state of things after war, we have to remember that, as 
 Aristotle said, war is for the sake of peace; and that 
 strenuous industrialism under armed peace, if no more 
 than that were achieved at the close, would only be 
 another form of war. It would be a form, we must add, 
 in which the nobler competition for the higher goods 
 would be permanently instead of temporarily eclipsed. 
 The ideal of our foes would have conquered. 
 
 Even in a state of war, the older ideals of honour and 
 chivalry were an application of a law of more refined 
 justice, and not of efficiency; for they consisted in not 
 using power to the full, in giving the advantage of a 
 conventional rule in case of doubt to one's opponent or 
 competitor and not to oneself. 
 
 If, as is possible, these ideals, Greek or romantic, of 
 a world that had emerged or was emerging from bar- 
 barism, should ever by general consent be restored in 
 a new form, clearly it is only ways of thinking and feeling 
 enlightened by philosophy that can restore them. No 
 science and no speciahsm — as the ancients saw clearly 
 enough when there was much less of them — can be any- 
 thing but instrumental. In the absence of sufficient philo- 
 sophy, knowledge how to do things may even be pernicious^. 
 
 ^ Its compensation comes, if not otherwise, then through the working 
 of the cosmic powers. A world- war, by setting back "dispersive 
 specialism" except as applied to the destructive arts, may do the work 
 assigned by Comte to his priesthood of Humanity, and prepare the way 
 for the renewed influence of general ideas. 
 
 7—2
 
 100 ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS [CH. 
 
 On the other side, an ethical view of this kind may 
 become overstrained if appUed to action when the 
 condition of conflict is perpetual and no reciprocal 
 moderation can be expected from antagonists. By such 
 overstraining we get the scrupulously faultless persons 
 treated with scorn by Carlyle, and in one typical case 
 condemned by Dante to the vestibule of Hell. After all, 
 the end of action is to produce some effect, and it is some- 
 times not morally permissible to consider too curiously. 
 The judgment of the world, however, is in the long run 
 lenient to the scrupulous even when they have been 
 rather futile, and is often unjust to those who have 
 pushed devotion to ends to excess without regard for the 
 ethical hmit. Apologies are still needed — and still forth- 
 coming — for Machiavelli's abstraction from moral con- 
 siderations in his discussion of the modes of obtaining 
 and preserving political powder. This, impartially Ci&n- 
 sidered, seems to be a case in which we may rightly blame 
 the world as it actually was rather than the man. 
 Machiavelli did not invent the methods he analyses, and 
 he does not defend them as just. He nowhere calls 
 good evil and evil good. He simply discusses, without 
 sophistication and with the insight of a practical thinker, 
 what a prince or a people must do for self-preservation 
 and aggrandisement in a world where moral hmits are 
 disregarded; and his end was a perfectly justifiable one 
 — the freedom of his country from rule by alien enemies. 
 Here the word "justifiable" may be taken in its strictest 
 sense, as that which was required by justice. The alien 
 enemies were unjust enemies. 
 
 Some other apparent conflicts of ideal ends with the 
 most rigorous interpretation of the moral law can be
 
 Vl] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS 101 
 
 resolved ultimately into conflicts of duties. For example, 
 as Mr F. H. Bradley showed in his Ethical Studies^, the 
 most obvious formula of a moral hfe is "my station and 
 its duties," interpreted in a rather conservative sense. 
 This, he then seemed to hold, covers most of the ground. 
 Yet, as he also showed, devotion to an individually 
 selected ideal end, even when it involves some neglect or 
 disregard of more obvious duties, cannot be finally con- 
 demned as immoral. Kant, discussing what is substantially 
 the same case in the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 
 found it to be in general a duty (given the capacity) to 
 choose the more elevated end — the end of progress in dis- 
 tinction from mere conservation. Not to aim at the higher 
 good would be an actual neglect of duty. The argument 
 of course is from what you would desire that others should 
 do — or not leave undone — in similar circumstances. 
 
 In association rather than logical connexion with this 
 topic, the controversy about "art for art" suggests itself. 
 Though now silent, it is still interesting, and it may 
 revive again. The artists who took up the formula seem 
 to have been perfectly right in so far as they insisted 
 that art is one of the absolute values in human hfe, not 
 reducible to anything else. Their appeal, however, was 
 fundamentally to ethics in a sufiiciently abstracted and 
 generahsed sense. The "morahsts" against whom they 
 appealed were those who had regard only to a very 
 restricted order of values ; who were setting up a certain 
 Umited social ideal of their time and country, and 
 factitiously transferring to this the feeling of obligation 
 that properly attaches itself only to the eternal and 
 
 1 Dating from 1876, and not, I believe, representing in all respects 
 Mr Bradley's present views.
 
 102 ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS [CH. 
 
 immutable principles. The reason of the antagonism was 
 in fact that the most authorised morahsts had no principle 
 but that of the end, and therefore felt bound to see no 
 virtue but in their own type. The more rigorous system 
 can be more hberal. From the point of view of the 
 moral law, the justice of the claim to pursue beauty or 
 truth as an end in itself, when once these ends have 
 emerged consciously, is plain. And here there is a 
 certain symmetry in the positions we have to take up. 
 The artist, on his side, without departing from the 
 aesthetic standard, cannot but recognise the beauty of 
 the moral law; just as the purely speculative thinker 
 must recognise the truth that the moral law exists as an 
 ideal. Of course no actual human being is such a creature 
 of abstraction as to come purely and simpl}'^ under one 
 of these types; to be moraUst, artist or thinker and 
 nothing else: but the points of view exist, and it was 
 important to have them distinguished, and even expressed 
 with some exclusiveness. Only thus could the rights of 
 the different modes of life be estabhshed. And the 
 artists who protest against the intrusion of irrelevant 
 morahties ought always to remember that it was Kant, 
 the ethical rigorist, who first gave the philosophy of the 
 Beautiful its distinctive and co-equal place side by side 
 with the philosophy of the True and of the Good. 
 
 I now proceed to discuss more circumstantially two 
 questions suggested by Juvalta's brief conclusion on the 
 relation of ethics to politics and religion. I shall take 
 first the question of religious persecution and then that of 
 international ethics^. 
 
 ^ I have sometimes called this also international law; but, as will 
 be seen, I have not had in view the existing more or less recognised
 
 Vl] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS 103 
 
 On the first question it seems to me that the law of 
 justice gives a perfectly clear decision. The renunciation, 
 in the introductory chapter of Mill's Liberty, of any 
 advantage "from the idea of abstract right, as a thing 
 independent of utihty," must be itself in turn disclaimed ; 
 though this does not in the least deprive Mill's arguments 
 of their value and efficacy. For Mill's appeal is, as he 
 said, to "utility in the largest sense, grounded on the 
 permanent interests of man as a progressive being." 
 And this appeal was exactly adapted to meet the case of 
 those who acquiesced in the policy of repressing certain 
 opinions because they were afraid that if those opinions 
 were to spread the result would be the dissolution of 
 society. Like all the other classical modern defences of 
 intellectual liberty, it was an appeal to statesmen and men 
 of the world. It differs from the appeal of Spinoza for 
 "liberty of philosopliising" only by introducing the con- 
 ception of progress which had in the meantime come 
 decisively into view. Both arguments equally are 
 grounded on the welfare of the State and of human 
 society. In Milton's argument for liberty of the press, it 
 may be noted in passing, there is already an implied 
 appeal to progress; while Locke, in his plea for religious 
 toleration, is content if he can prove it consistent with 
 social and political order. Now some speculative ad- 
 vocates of persecution have put themselves on the same 
 ground. It is undoubtedly for the sake of the permanence 
 and welfare of the State — his second-best State — that 
 Plato elaborates his scheme of an ethical religion taught 
 
 customs and conventions among nations, in particvilar for mitigating 
 the usages of war, but a certain ideal of international morality which 
 can be called "law" because the relations it implies are those of justice.
 
 104 ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS [CH. 
 
 by authority and maintained by repression of all opinions 
 inconsistent with it. The root of the historic persecutions, 
 however, was not in misunderstood utihty. The scheme 
 of Plato's Laws had no influence on his philosophical 
 successors; and demonstrably it had nothing to do with 
 the actual policy of persecution that dominated Europe 
 later. Yet that policy, after its dechne, has sometimes 
 found retrospective defenders on what we may call in 
 a very general sense humanist grounds. Joseph de 
 Maistre, a really benevolent man, who wished well to the 
 human race, defended the Spanish Inquisition on the 
 express ground that unity of dogma secured social peace ; 
 and his argument for the overloidship of the Papacy 
 was that it represented the ideal of international law 
 over warring kingdoms, and was the only check on mis- 
 government by monarchs that was consistent with 
 pohtical order. This of course had been met historically, 
 before it was put forward, by the repeated proofs that 
 insistence on authoritative dogma had been oftener a 
 cause of the dissolution of States than of their conser- 
 vation; but the reasoning is here of a kind that the 
 champion of liberty can reply to without raising the 
 deeper question of a joriori right. Defenders of punish- 
 ment for opinion who reason in relation to the good of 
 human society can be adequately met on the ground of 
 utihty, and could conceivably be persuaded that they 
 were wrong. 
 
 This ground, however, if we find ourselves obliged to 
 recognise an a priori element in ethics, is not ultimate. 
 And it will not meet every case. Critical readers have 
 observed that Mill's arguments do not touch "the logical 
 persecutor." For in fact the logical persecutor does not
 
 Vl] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS 105 
 
 aim at any end of human society or of the State, but at 
 the preservation of a certain dogma as dogma. He wills 
 that this shall prevail, and he takes the most efficacious 
 methods; of which the true type was the Albigensian 
 Crusade followed by the Dominican Inquisition^. If you 
 prove, as Spinoza did, that enforced uniformity of dogma 
 is not preservative but destructive of commonwealths, 
 the reply he has in reserve is that a commonwealth may 
 rightly be exterminated for deviation from the dogma 
 authoritatively taught by a corporation that is above all 
 human societies. What reply have we then? The only 
 adequate reply is that the logical persecutor stands for 
 direct injustice in the highest things. He is not an 
 opponent with whom it is possible to reason, but an 
 "unjust enemy" in a deeper sense than that in which 
 Kant's phrase can be applied to a hostile nation or 
 potentate. For, professedly regarding belief in what he 
 holds for truth as the highest thing in himself, he makes 
 it his aim systematically to repress the beliefs of others. 
 If there is injustice at all, it is here; and, if we carry our 
 ethics into metaphysics, it may be said to be a sin against 
 eternal justice. 
 
 From this, the clearest possible case of the direct 
 application of abstract ethics, the question of inter- 
 national law differs in being perhaps the most complicated 
 case. It depends not only on knowledge, but even on 
 a behef, or the possibiUty of a belief, that may be called 
 metaphysical. And yet Kant, who himself pointed out 
 
 1 The Spanish Inquisition, as M. Salomon Rcinach has shown, is 
 wrongly taken as typical, for its motives were not purely dogmatic and 
 its methods were in some respects relatively lenient : see Cultes, Mythea 
 et Religions, ii. 401-417 ("L' Inquisition et les Juifs"); cf. iii. 472-509 
 ("L' Inquisition d'Espagne").
 
 106 ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS [CH. 
 
 this, regarded it as deducible, certain postulates being 
 granted, from the law of justice. The difficulty of the 
 case will appear if we contrast Kant's view with Spinoza's. 
 Spinoza did not admit any valid international law or 
 ethics at all ; and this seemed to him to follow rigorously 
 from his system, of which the "statical" character is 
 not always kept sufficiently in view. Nations, he holds, 
 are in the "state of nature" with regard to one another. 
 In this state there is neither justice nor injustice, but the 
 rights of all extend as far as their power. Since this is 
 so now, it will always be so ; because the universe mani- 
 fests at all times all degrees of perfection that are possible ; 
 and (this seems to be implied) we have no reason for 
 supposing the earth to be better or worse in the kinds of 
 manifestations it offers than any other inhabited globe if 
 such exists. From time to time individuals appear who 
 Hve by the dictate of reason and succeed in attaining 
 the ideal of "the free man." From time to time also 
 free States arise (democracies or aristocracies or limited 
 monarchies), and these are better than States despotically 
 ruled. When they have come to exist they can be pre- 
 served for a period by human wisdom ; but the general 
 distribution of types of men and States will not change^. 
 Now international law, from this point of view, was an 
 institution in its nature chimerical; and Spinoza puts it 
 in the most precise terms that States simply have no 
 
 1 Tractatus Politicus, i. 3: "Et sane milii plane persuadeo, ex- 
 perientiam omnia civitatum genera, quae coneipi possunt, ut homines 
 concorditer vivant, et simul media, quibus multitude dirigi seu quibus 
 intra certos limites contineri debeat, ostendisse; ita ut non credam, 
 nos posse aliquid, quod ab experientia sive praxi non abhorreat, 
 cogitatione de hac re assequi, quod nondum expertum compertumque 
 sit."
 
 Vl] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS 107 
 
 ground of complaint against each other for injustice. 
 Probably he thought it useful to warn a small free State 
 like Holland that it would be mere folly to expect the 
 faith of treaties to be observed when they had ceased to 
 be to the advantage of a more powerful State that had 
 entered into them^. This, I admit, is an interpretation 
 developed a little beyond the text ; but I think it defends 
 Spinoza from the charge of " immorahsm " which has been 
 brought against his doctrine of international politics-. 
 It is not immoral to abandon the attempt to realise what 
 we know from the nature of things can never be; and 
 Spinoza thought he had apodictic certainty. 
 
 Now Kant's opinion, though this is not obvious on 
 the surface, was not at all that such a view of the universe 
 must be decisively rejected. In fact, he seems to have 
 held it quite possibly true^. But, he holds, it cannot 
 be dogmatically asserted. And undoubtedly we should 
 desire, if this were possible, that the moral law recognised 
 within States should be extended to their mutual relations. 
 The end to be desired then is a state of perpetual peace. 
 It is not a duty to believe in the attainabiUty of this; 
 for there is no obligation to hold any belief*. The duty 
 
 ^ Tractatus Politicus, iii. 14. 
 
 2 He himself was one of the apologists of Machiavelli, of whom he 
 says (Tract. Pol. v. 7) that, even if we do not know what his aim was, 
 it is reasonable to suppose that so wise a man had some good end in 
 view. Still more may this be assumed of Spinoza; who certainly 
 would not have wished to inspire Bismarck, though it is possible that 
 his teaching on this subject may have had that effect. 
 
 3 There is just as much genuine science in anything as there is 
 application of mathematics ; and the reality behind the appearance of 
 final causes may be mechanism. (See Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der 
 Naturwissenschaft and Kritik der Urtheilskraff.) 
 
 * Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Rechtslehre, 2 Theil, 3 Abschnitt, 
 Beschluss.
 
 108 ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS [CH. 
 
 is to act in accordance with the idea of the end, so long as 
 its impossibility cannot be demonstrated. And he held 
 it possible, consistently with what can be demonstrated 
 metaphysically, to believe that through the historical 
 process (supposed teleological) a permanently superior 
 order of political society will be attained as compared 
 with the past. Essentially it is on the ground of such a 
 postulate of progress, inadmissible for Spinoza, that Kant is 
 able to carry the rule of justice into international relations. 
 Kant's ideal of those relations was not peace on any 
 terms, more especiallyv^not under a world-State, but peace 
 among free States recognising one another's equal rights 
 to an independent life of their own. Even a federal 
 woi Id-State he held to be inconsistent with this. His 
 ideal was not federalism, but " federality," which meant 
 fluctuating arrangements among States to keep the peace, 
 but without any central tribunal possessing coercive 
 powers. Schemes of modern pacificists that suppose a 
 fixed organisation like that of a federal union can find no 
 support in Kant. Doubtless he would have thought no 
 international law at all better than a system of this kind; 
 for in an anarchy of States each can fight for its own free 
 existence when threatened, and may find allies; whereas 
 an international organisation strong enough to keep the 
 peace by force would be in effect a world-State. And 
 that, in Kant's opinion, was a sinister dream. Inter- 
 national law, in his view, must always remain essentially 
 international ethics, with no sanction except in opinion 
 and feeling and the possibihty of forming aUiances against 
 aggression. Necessarily therefore the fundamental con- 
 dition of his "perpetual peace" was that the internal life 
 of each national State must be completely self-directed.
 
 Vl] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS 109 
 
 On the whole, I do not think it possible at present 
 to add anything important to the conditions of Kant. 
 The element of abstract ethics in his theory, it may be 
 observed, is this : that the norms which present them- 
 selves, after long experience of social and political order, 
 as rules that ought to be observed also between States, 
 are the rules of justice. States ought to recognise one 
 another's rights to existence as if they were equal persons. 
 Now this mutual recognition of personal rights is proper to 
 polities in a general sense republican. Hence only among 
 States republican in this sense (which includes consti- 
 tutional but not despotic monarchies) does Kant expect 
 the international ideal he has sketched in outline to be 
 permanently recognised. The question then finally is, 
 Can we expect that this republican ideal will prevail? 
 If so, we have grounds for believing in progress towards 
 perpetual peace. Kant believed in it^ ; but the theo- 
 retical position he thought necessary and sustainable was 
 merely that it is not metaphysically excluded. His 
 doctrine therefore amounts to scepticism, but a scepticism 
 certainly not unfavourable to action. 
 
 Before leaving the subject, it will be interesting to set 
 out briefly Kant's expressions of opinion on the attempt 
 of any single State to continue the method of aiming at 
 union by subjugating other States instead of seeking to 
 live at peace with them. It is the duty of States, he says, 
 since the possibility of this is not excluded, to endeavour 
 to estabHsh permanent peace with one another. To will 
 
 1 Kant's faith in the potency of the republican ideal is very definitely 
 expressed in a passage of the Rechtslehre, § 52: "Dies ist die einzige 
 bleibende Staatsverfassung, wo das Gesetz selbstherrschend ist und an 
 keiner besonderen Person hangt."
 
 110 ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS [CH. 
 
 otherwise is to will injustice; for the condition of war 
 is that of injustice. What then, among nations, is an 
 "unjust enemy" ? "It is that of which the will, publicly- 
 expressed (by word or deed), betrays a maxim according 
 to which, if it were made a general rule, no state of peace 
 among peoples would be possible, but the state of nature 
 must be perpetuated^." Under this definition comes the 
 violation of public treaties. This concerns all peoples, 
 whose freedom is thereby threatened, and who are called 
 upon to unite themselves and take away the power of 
 such action from the people that is guilty of the wrong. 
 Yet this does not imply the right to make a State vanish 
 from the earth; for that would be injustice against the 
 people, which cannot lose its original right to combine 
 into a commonwealth; though it may be required to 
 adopt a new constitution unfavourable to the disposition 
 to war. 
 
 Some formal qualifications follow ; as that in the state 
 of nature, which is the state of war, all are in their degree 
 unjust. "The expression 'an unjust enemy' is in the 
 state of nature pleonastic; for the state of nature is 
 itself a state of injustice." This, however, does not 
 modify the substance of Kant's judgment, which refers to 
 an aggressive return to the state of nature after it has 
 been mitigated by agreements. 
 
 In concluding the chapter, a word must be said on 
 a topic which Kant is sometimes blamed for excluding 
 from his ethics altogether. It is undoubtedly true that, 
 in common with other thinkers much influenced by 
 Stoicism, he regards animals, because "irrational," as 
 not properly having "rights." Yet, by drawing certain 
 
 ^ Metaphysische Anfangsgrilnde der Rechtslehre, § 60.
 
 Vl] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS 111 
 
 formal distinctions, he is able to recognise duties "in 
 relation to" animals. It is part of man's "duty to 
 himself" not to weaken sympathetic feeling by cruel 
 treatment of them. In putting them to death, as httle 
 pain as possible is to be inflicted ; they are not to be 
 worked beyond their strength ; and the unnecessary use of 
 painful experiments for the sake of mere speculative 
 knowledge is to be reprobated. "Even gratitude for the 
 long-rendered services of an old horse or dog (as if they 
 were house- companions) belongs indirectly to the duty of 
 man in relation to the animals; directly considered, it 
 remains only a duty of man towards himself^." 
 
 We may not find this enough: it does not go as far 
 as Pythagoreanism or even as Positivism ; but I think in 
 some reports of Kant's doctrine the passage has been 
 left out of view. The general position of his abstract 
 ethics, that animals are to be regarded as means not 
 ends, and therefore as things not persons, has probably 
 effaced a detail that only comes into his concrete ethics. 
 I do not find the position even here quite satisfactory; 
 but Kant's restrictions on the conception of right do not 
 seem to me to follow from the general notion of abstract 
 ethics. The broader view of Juvalta about ends would 
 certainly (though he does not discuss the question) allow 
 a general deduction of maxims of justice, and not merely 
 of benevolence, towards animals. For animals have a 
 resemblance to persons in so far as they are ends for 
 
 ^ I cite the passage with Kant's italics, by which he indicates technical 
 distinctions about which he is careful: "Selbst Dankbarkeit fiir lang 
 geleistete Dienste eines alten Pferdes oder Hundes (gleich ala ob sie 
 Hausgenossen waren) gehort indirect zur Pflicht des Menschen, naralich 
 in Ansehung dieser Thiere, direct aber betrachtet ist sie immer nur 
 Pflicht des Menschen gegen sich selbst" (Tugendlehre, § 17).
 
 112 ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE ETHICS [CH. VI 
 
 themselves though unconsciously. Their "supreme end" 
 we may call self-conservation, including the "values" 
 involved in feehngs of vitahty and pleasures of perception. 
 Hence they ought to be treated with something resembling 
 the regard paid to persons. They may be considered as 
 having a right not to be unnecessarily injured or thwarted 
 in their natural activities. 
 
 Whether it would make much difference actually if 
 they were considered only as subjects of benevolence 
 I do not know. Comte, who did not recognise "rights" 
 but only "duties," gives an important place to the do- 
 mestic animals as a subordinate portion of the great 
 organism which is Humanity. And, in a speculation at 
 the end of the Tugendlehre on the constitution of the 
 universe, Kant himself throws out the conjecture that 
 Love must be conceived as creating the world and Justice 
 as only the hmiting condition^. This he regards as lying 
 beyond the bounds of ethics and leaving for reason an 
 insoluble problem. Yet, before meeting with the passage 
 in Kant, I had arrived at the idea not in this transcendent 
 sense, but as a possible formula for the life of Humanity. 
 I have already put it, as it presented itself to me, in dis- 
 cussing the relations of End and Law. The result seems 
 to be that the active thing in conduct is always in some 
 form love directed to an end. If then in one sense the 
 law is supreme, in another sense the end is supreme. In 
 hfe it is probably best, whenever it is possible, that the 
 end should be consciously and the hmit unconsciously 
 reahsed. 
 
 ^ In this "Schlussbemerkung," Eternal Justice is described as not 
 really personal, but only personified in the theistic conception, and is 
 compared to the Fate of the ancient philosophical poets.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSION 
 
 At this point, if we are to make progress, it seems to 
 me necessary to diverge from Kant. By the method of 
 the Practical Reason, nothing can be done in metaphysics. 
 I am one of those who, after reading the more subtly 
 speculative passages there and elsewhere, find themselves 
 led to the conclusion that the theological positions laid 
 down by Kant, so far as they coincide with ordinary 
 theism, are exoteric. Indeed he tells us this himself 
 sometimes almost in so many words. What is essentially 
 unsatisfactory in his procedure is that, after setting forth 
 evidently with the deepest conviction "the autonomy of 
 ethics," he appears to be justifying his ethical doctrine 
 retrospectively by a theoretical doctrine which we are to 
 choose, as against another equally possible, simply on the 
 ground of the ethics. And yet he himself, as we have 
 seen, admits that no beUef is obhgatory. To try to 
 defend all this, with whatever skill it may be done, can 
 lead only to fresh perplexities. No further insight is 
 attainable within the system. 
 
 The new departure I propose is to treat the ethical 
 
 w. E. 8
 
 114 METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSION [CH. 
 
 doctrine arrived at as established, and as needing no 
 foundation outside ethics; to admit nevertheless that it 
 raises metaphysical questions beyond itself which, if we 
 were not moral beings, we should not put; and then to 
 seek the answer to these as questions of speculative 
 truth. That is, we again treat them as ontological 
 questions: but we acknowledge that the terms in which 
 we ask them could not have been primarily derived from 
 any intellectual determinations of pure being; and that 
 the Kantian analysis has enabled us to understand much 
 better our own meaning in asking them. 
 
 First, however, we must know clearly what can be 
 arrived at before any question is put that involves ethical 
 terms. And here I think we cannot do better than recur 
 to Hume and then find if anything is added or taken 
 away by Comte. Metaphysical positions, if such exist, 
 that are left standing by Hume and Comte seem not 
 unlikely to prove indestructible. 
 
 The metaphysical positions we are now interested in 
 relate of course to the order of the whole, and not merely 
 to "theory of knowledge." 
 
 Now Hume, in the Dialogues concerning Natural 
 Religion, not directly applying the sceptical results of his 
 philosophy, but proceeding on the commonsense assump- 
 tion that the external world is known to us as a collection 
 of material objects, set himself to examine the customary 
 arguments for theism and to discuss the philosophical 
 objections to them. With such dialectical skill was this 
 done that it remains impossible to determine from the 
 Dialogues whether Hume was in opinion a Theist or not : 
 the drift of the arguments is completely sceptical. Yet 
 one position — not amounting to anything that can be
 
 VIl] METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSION 115 
 
 called Theism in the ordinary sense — remains as the 
 residue : " That the cause or causes of order in the universe 
 probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence." 
 Hume is quite clearly committed to this, though he tries, 
 with his constant determination to give sceptical colouring, 
 to minimise its importance. And, if we return from the 
 more popularly-written Dialogues to his radical philo- 
 sophical work, no less a residue necessarily remains after 
 all the destruction of dogmatisms. For the external 
 world is according to Hume (here continuing Berkeley) 
 phenomenal, that is, an appearance for mind; and if 
 even the "spirits" of Berkeley do not survive, but mind 
 also as substance or unity is dissolved after corporeal 
 substance has vanished, the disaggregated fragments that 
 are left, being "particular perceptions," are still mental. 
 Any philosophy whatever, that could be constructed by 
 starting with this residue as a new beginning, would 
 therefore necessarily imply a resemblance — doubtless 
 remote — of that which is ultimate in the causation of 
 what we call nature to human intelligence. 
 
 The expression is well known in which Comte de- 
 scribed Atheism as "the absurdest of all theologies." 
 This has sometimes been taken for a mere formal re- 
 pudiation of an unpopular name by a declaration of 
 agnosticism as against the profession to know things 
 in their reality. We know only phenomena, not their 
 "causes," and our knowledge is "relative." It is true 
 that Comte usually gives the impression of being at 
 bottom sure that the world is of the nature of an object 
 in which, apart from the life of men and animals, in- 
 telUgence has no part. Yet, if we look closely into some 
 few speculative passages, we find that the declaration 
 
 8—2
 
 116 METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSION [CH. 
 
 quoted, so far as it refers to mechanical atheism, is much 
 more than formal. For Comte's analysis of mechanicism 
 is very exact. He treats it, considered philosophically, as 
 the doctrine in which, from the "hylozoism" of the early 
 Greek thinkers, the subjective notion of something re- 
 sembling Hfe and intelligence in the material elements of 
 the world has been eliminated. This hylozoism itself he 
 regards as a derivative of "fetishism," or the primitive 
 theory that all things are animated by intelhgent wills. 
 In Comte's view this is the earhest of the "theologies," 
 which are attempts, prior to objective science, to make 
 a synthesis from the point of view of the subject. It is 
 not only the earliest, but the most plausible, and not the 
 least rational. It is the doctrine by which, in the final 
 stage of philosophy and religion, poetic imagination will 
 still be inspired. And, though known for fiction, it will 
 have this advantage, that it is really a synthesis, though 
 "subjective." An objective synthesis, on the other hand, 
 a synthetic view of nature dependent solely on principles 
 of science, is necessarily impossible; for science, to be 
 effective, has to deal with phenomena in their abstract 
 aspects, never as a totahty. Taking this view, clearly he 
 was fully entitled to say what he did about mechanical 
 atheism as an attempt at ultimate explanation. Hylo- 
 zoism is plausible because it begins with the elements of 
 both object and subject. Mechanicism, considered as an 
 "absolute" doctrine, and not merely as method in a 
 portion of the sciences, is devoid of all plausibility because 
 it rejects what is a part of every appearance, and then 
 tries to explain the rejected part by means of the rest. In 
 one passage Comte goes further, and definitely asserts, as 
 any idealist might, that if there were no intelligence
 
 VIl] METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSION 117 
 
 anywhere, no subject as distinguished from object, there 
 would be no real world at all^. 
 
 The basis of intelligence as known in our experience 
 is life ; hence for our world to be a real world at all it was 
 necessary that life should exist. Cosmology and biology 
 imply one another. As a science, in Comte's view, 
 biology is necessarily teleological ; and, knowing in detail 
 (as many biologists do not) what mathematico-mechanical 
 explanation means, he held this character to be incapable 
 of resolution into anything else. There is no possibility 
 of expressing the nature of life in terms of mechanism. 
 Each higher science, while it depends on the lower, 
 introduces a new principle necessitated by the new 
 compUcation of its phenomena. Thus, while physics and 
 chemistry form the necessary basis of the sciences of life, 
 the simplest vital phenomenon cannot be expressed in 
 purely physico-chemical terms. And this does not mean 
 (as Kant might have said) that biology in so far as it is 
 non-mathematical falls short of being a true science. The 
 immanent purpose of an organism, the coordinated direc- 
 tion of its activities to ends, is a strictly scientific con- 
 ception, and must be held the permanently distinguishing 
 notion of biology in the series of the abstract sciences^. 
 
 ^ Systerne de Politique Positive, t. i. p. 439: "II existe, sans doutc, 
 beaucoup d'astres incompatibles avec tout organisme, animal ou meme 
 vegetal, comme le sont, dans notre nionde, les corps d^pourvus d'atmos- 
 ph^re. Mais notre planfete fut-elle, contre toute vraisemblance, la scule 
 habitee, 11 faut bien que la vie et la pensee se developpe au moins \k 
 pour concevoir sans contradiction la moindre existence r^elle. En un 
 mot, tout ph6nomfeno suppose un spectateur ; puisqu'il consiste toujours 
 en une relation d^terrainee entre un objet et un sujet." 
 
 * Such a distinctively scientific mind as Claude Bernard is thought 
 to have been influenced by Comte in the application of this idea to
 
 118 METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSION [CH. 
 
 This portion of Comte's doctrine leads further than 
 he ever came to recognise. Fuller consideration would 
 have shown that a "subjective synthesis," such as that 
 which he planned and partly carried out, may, if its free 
 imaginations are brought under logical conditions, claim 
 for itself truth or the possibility of truth and not mere 
 permissibihty as poetic fiction. Incidentally we perceive 
 this when he points out that life does not emerge in a 
 cosmos to which it is only accidentally related, but that 
 in inorganic phenomena there is something preparatory of 
 vital phenomena. " Habit," for example, is not hmited to 
 living beings^. This is an anticipation of the results of 
 some recent researches. The philosophical consequence 
 seems to be that the inorganic itself admits of no complete 
 explanation from the abstract sciences specially elaborated 
 to deal with it as one aspect of the world^. For the facts 
 brought to light — the quasi-organic character of some 
 processes in inorganic things — have been made out by 
 purely experimental research, not as the verification of 
 
 physiology. And Littre, averse as he was from Comte's later develop- 
 ments, always continued to hold that teleology must be accepted simply 
 as the mode of law according to which organic phenomena are connected. 
 
 ^ Politique Positive, i. pp. 606-607 : "En effet, la tendance a repro- 
 duire spontanement certains phenomenes vitaux, sans le concours de 
 leurs sources primitives, est essentiellement analogue a la disposition 
 qui fait partout persister dans un etat quelconque apres la cessation 
 de I'impulsion correspondante. L'unique difference des deux proprietes 
 resulte de la discontinuity des fonctions envers lesquelles la persistance 
 universelle devient I'habitude specials. Or, cette transformation n'est 
 point strictement bornee aux corps vivants. Elle se manifesto aussi en 
 cosmologie, surtout quant aux phenomenes du son, dans les appareils 
 dont Taction s'interrompt, et qui reproduisent mieux les effets assez 
 reiteres." 
 
 2 Cf. Politique Positive, i. p. 221: "I'ensemble est seul reel, les 
 parties ne pouvant avoir qu'une existence abstraite."
 
 VIl] METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSION 119 
 
 any mathematico-mechanical formula showing that they 
 were to be expected. Thus their effect is not to suggest 
 that mechanical explanations will sometime exhaust all 
 that there is in phenomena of apparent teleology, but 
 that, for a grasp of the whole, teleology must be carried 
 back into the inorganic. 
 
 Too preoccupied with human life to discuss such 
 cosmical speculations otherwise than incidentally, Comte, 
 in summing up the position as regards Theism, sub- 
 stantially coincides with Hume. "Although the natural 
 order is in all respects very imperfect, its production is 
 much more reconcilable with the supposition of an in- 
 telligent will than \\ath that of a bhnd mechanism^." 
 The difference here is one of accent. Comte turns his 
 polemical stress against the dogmatic Atheist, Hume 
 against the traditional Theist. 
 
 Thus for both Hume and Comte the analogy of the 
 world to a work of human art does not wholly disappear. 
 For Kant, apart from a theology which at least is not 
 for him demonstrable truth, it remains only an analogy. 
 This he definitely states in relation to Hume's Dialogues 
 concerning Natural Religion". Nothing is to be asserted as 
 to what the Highest Reahty is in itself, but only in re- 
 lation to the World, which is to be viewed as if directed 
 by sovereign Reason^. It might therefore be contended 
 (rather in the manner of Hume when he sets against one 
 
 1 Politique Positive, i. p. 48: "Quoique I'ordre naturel soit, k tous 
 egards, tr^s-imparfait, sa production se concilierait beaucoup mieux avec 
 la supposition d'une volonte intciligente qu'avcc celle d'un aveugle 
 mecanisme." It will be observed that my quotations are all from the 
 great work of Comte' s later period. 
 
 2 Prolegomena, § 58. 
 
 3 This is also the position of Plotinus.
 
 120 METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSION [CH. 
 
 another the positions of the Theist and the Atheist) that 
 all agree: those thinkers who are considered friendly to 
 the theistic tradition admit that there is only an analogy ; 
 those who are considered unfriendly admit that there is 
 an analogy. This, however, would not quite accurately 
 describe the real position of the question. If, as I have 
 argued in the first chapter, an a priori or transcendental 
 element (in the Kantian sense) must be recognised in 
 human knowledge, the aspect of the analogy is not quite 
 the same as it is without that admission. The general 
 analogy, with Hume quite indeterminate, points with 
 Comte to the kind of universal sentiency which he allowed 
 himself to imagine as the subject of poetic fictions. With 
 a theory of knowledge modified in the Kantian direction, 
 it points to a different speculative ontology. This specu- 
 lative ontology is further modified when we allow also an 
 a priori element in ethics. If these new elements can be 
 included in the data from which we argue, we are entitled 
 to add successively to Hume's minimum the propositions : 
 That the cause or causes of order in the universe probably 
 bear some remote analogy to human reason or intellect; and 
 That the cav^e or causes of order in the universe probably 
 bear some remote analogy to human justice. I will try to 
 show how these modifications are defensible. 
 
 The use of the word "cause," it must be allowed, is 
 somewhat inaccurate and popular : what is meant is the 
 ground of order, the metaphysical reahty on which the 
 manifestation of order depends. Now the meaning of 
 the transcendental or a priori element in knowledge is 
 this: that certain principles, which cannot be derived 
 from mere experience as we receive it, are necessary to 
 constitute experience as a coherent system. This means
 
 VIl] METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSION 121 
 
 that the element of "relation" in knowledge, as dis- 
 tinguished from its sensible elements, is as "real" as 
 these; that it is not a mere factitious product of the 
 shifting of the (psychically) material elements. Relations 
 in logic and mathematics and the sciences of causation 
 are not mere blank forms left by the evacuation of deposits 
 from without, but belong to the mind's own activity. 
 But also they are not (as might be inferred from some of 
 Kant's own statements) factitiously imposed on nature 
 by the human mind. What the actual achievements of 
 science prove is that nature shows itself interpretable by 
 mind when mind has the audacity to dictate what its 
 constitution shall be, — provided it combines with this 
 audacity a readiness to immerse itself in facts and change 
 its hypotheses when they will not work. 
 
 This view of knowledge enables us to proceed to so 
 much of speculative ontology as has been contended for ; 
 but of course we do not pretend to arrive at it without 
 one of those assumptions, called axioms, which are of the 
 very constitution of knowledge. What we have to as- 
 sume is simply the principle "Nothing from nothing." 
 It cannot be without something corresponding in that 
 from which the mind emerges that there are in the mind 
 applicable principles of knowledge. The human mind as 
 it exists is obviously in some sense a product of a larger 
 whole; hence the principles by which it successfully 
 interprets that whole must be in some way prefigured in 
 the reahty of the whole. 
 
 Clearly this is just as true for the principles of morals 
 as of theoretical science. Doubtless, as was said, if we 
 had no ethical interests we should not ask why there are 
 principles of morals; but since we are, as a matter of
 
 122 METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSION [CH. 
 
 fact, moral beings, the bearing of those principles on the 
 nature of the whole is a speculative question that neces- 
 sarily presents itself. Thus our result, if vahd at all, will 
 be theoretically vahd. A metaphysical doctrine that is 
 the response to moral questioning is not of the nature of 
 a decision for the sake of practice, but is the completion 
 of a speculative ontology by means of elements pro- 
 visionally abstracted from when the human mind was 
 regarded merely as constructing a science of nature. 
 
 Man, as we have seen, also constructs a science of 
 ethics, or of what ought to be. In constructing it, he 
 has passed historically to a higher degree of abstraction. 
 Concrete ethics, or the art of life in so far as it is worked 
 out in view of the hmiting conditions imposed by morahty 
 proper, we found, is related to abstract ethics, or the 
 science of the limiting conditions themselves, as the 
 geometry of antiquity to modern analytical geometry. 
 Here we were able to apply the strict notion of analogy 
 in Kant's sense : the things themselves are not alike, but 
 there is a resemblance of relations. This resemblance of 
 relations depends on the existence of an a priori element 
 in morahty capable of development to purer detachment, 
 but always present in the human mind since it began to 
 reflect on conduct as consisting in interactions among 
 social beings. 
 
 This notion of abstract ethics impressed itself very 
 strongly on Schopenhauer; who was certainly not too 
 desirous of agreeing with Kant, and who, by natural bias, 
 was inchned to look to the end and the concrete case 
 rather than to bring conduct under a system of general 
 laws. Through the recognised necessity of admitting an 
 a priori element in morahty, he was led to formulate his
 
 VIl] METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSION 123 
 
 metaphysical doctrine of "eternal justice." It is true 
 that the earher expression he gives to this, involving the 
 ultimate illusiveness of the individual, does not answer 
 any demand ever made by men for justice in the universe : 
 the important thing was that the demand should be 
 recognised, even in an ostensibly pessimistic system, as 
 needing a response. Aiming at no more than the state- 
 ment of an analogy, I am content at present with this 
 support for the general argument. I simply argue that 
 the existence of inexpugnable a priori elements in moral 
 as in natural science entitles us to assert, since nothing 
 comes from nothing, that not only Reason but Justice in 
 some sense is a pre-existent reahty ordering the constitu- 
 tion of the whole that is partly known to us in the world 
 and in man. 
 
 We cannot, on the ground of this argument, straight- 
 way identify Reason and Justice with the Whole of 
 Reahty, or the Absolute. The position indicated is the 
 Platonic position, in some generalised sense, that "Mind 
 is King." From this we must not infer the personahty 
 of that which directs the process of the world; but, 
 personahsed or not, it is this, rather than the Absolute, 
 when we come to consider it closely and not vaguely, 
 that corresponds to the theological idea of God. 
 
 To trace out the realisation of the order of reason and 
 justice in the world, a modern mind will look first to its 
 evolution, physical and organic, and then to the historical 
 evolution of man. But, if we are to take the idea of 
 Eternal Justice seriously, these, singly or together, are 
 insufficient. For eternal justice to have a meaning, we 
 must affirm what Schopenhauer called the aseitas of the 
 individual, and consider the destiny of this. It would be
 
 124 METAPHYSICAL CONCLUSION [CH. Vn 
 
 unjust, as he insists, if the Destiny that judges had first 
 created by its will that which it is to judge. Nor is each 
 individual to be considered, as sometimes from the point 
 of view of biological and sociological science, simply as 
 an organ through which all the rest of the world acts and 
 which is nothing in itself. It is not a mere complex of 
 hereditary and socially-impressed tendencies, though 
 these contribute to make it empirically what it is ; it 
 includes something — ^that which has not proceeded from 
 anything else^without which the whole world would be 
 different. And perhaps this imphes (what I think 
 Schopenhauer does not say) that some individuals are 
 radically evil. This is conjectured to be the meaning of 
 a well-known but obscure passage in Plato's Laws^. 
 Being thus led to carry forward our speculations to the 
 individual, there is no reason, so long as we can put our 
 questions in intelligible terms, why we should cease to 
 ask them. In the hope of a possible answer we may be 
 led to consider again whether any insight is still to be 
 found in those Greek and Indian theodicies which suppose 
 permanent individualities with lives recurrent in suc- 
 cessive ages of the world. The conditions of attempting 
 any new construction with such help seem to me to be 
 a certain freedom of imaginative conjecture together with 
 a constant willingness to bring our imaginations into 
 relation with every kind of demonstrated science. But 
 this lies beyond the bounds of the present Essay. 
 
 ^ X. 896 E, with context. What Plato says directly is that some (at 
 least one) soul in the universe must be potentially maleficent, and that 
 this cannot be the soul that guides the whole. I derive the interpre- 
 tation from Professor Burnet.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Aeschylus, 30 
 
 Alexander the Great, 46 
 
 Altruism, 32, 50, 51 etc. 
 
 Animals, rights of, 110-112 
 
 Antigone, 30, 64 
 
 A priori, 5 etc. 
 
 Aristotle, 19, 25, 31, 46 n., 65, 98, 
 
 99 
 "Art for art," 101-102 
 Aseitas, 123 
 Attic drama, 48 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 3, 4, 34 
 
 Bacon, Roger, 34 
 
 Bentham, J., 23, 28 
 
 Berkeley, 3, 5, 12, 13 ff., 55, 115 
 
 Bernard, CI., 117 n. 
 
 Bismarck, 107 n. 
 
 Bradley, F. H., 101 
 
 Burnet, J., 124 n. 
 
 CaUicles, 74 
 
 Cantor, G., 17 n. 
 
 Carlyle, 100 
 
 Casuistry, 36 
 
 Catecjorical Imperative, 58, 59, 77 
 
 Chivah-y, 99 
 
 Clarke, Samuel, 54 
 
 Comte, 3, 5, 25; altruism, 32-36; 
 
 64, 70, 92, 93, 95, 99 n., 112; 
 
 on Theology and Final Causes, 
 
 ch. vn 
 Conscience, 56, 69 n. 
 Contradiction, law of, 7-8, 60 
 Creon, 30; and Prussian State, 
 
 64 n. 
 Cud worth, 51-55 
 Culture, as end, 85-86 
 
 Dante, 62, 100 
 Democritus, 14 
 De Morgan, A., 16 
 Descartes, compared with Bacon, 
 4 ; his rationalism, 4^5 ; critical 
 
 point of view, 12, 41 ; geometry, 
 40; on Hobbes, 41 
 
 Education, moral, 93 
 Efficiency, 98-99 
 End, ethical, 26 etc., and law, 112 
 Epicurus, 24, 91 
 Experientialism, 3, 11 etc. 
 
 Fate, 112 n. 
 
 Ferguson, W. Scott, 46 n. 
 
 Francis, St, 59 
 
 Galileo, 17 n. 
 Gibbon, 60 
 
 Happiness, 23, 64 n., 66, 69 
 "Hedonical calculus," 24, 63 
 Hedonism, 22 ff. ; egoistic, 87 
 Hegel, 13; criticism of Kant's 
 
 ethics, 63-65 
 Hobbes, 3; founder of abstract 
 ethics, 40-50; opposition to, 
 50-55; absolutism, 74; 92 n.; 
 egoistic basis, 94 
 Hugo, v., 61 n. 
 Humanity, Religion of, 70 
 Hume, 3, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13; ought 
 and is, 19; benevolent utili- 
 tarianism, 56; 80 n.; relation 
 to Theism, ch. vn 
 Hylozoism, 116 
 
 "Immoralism," 53, 107 
 Imperialism, 46 
 Infinite, mathematical, 16-18 
 "Innate ideas," 4-5 
 Inquisition, 104-105 
 Intuitionism, 56, 66 n. 
 Isocrates, 49, 60 
 
 Justice, in ancient and modem 
 ethics, 31 ; liberty and, 83 ff. ; 
 eternal, 105, 112 n., 123
 
 126 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Juvalta, E., 59, 65; exposition of 
 his ethics, ch. v; 90, 91, 92, 94, 
 102, 111 
 
 Kant, 1, 5, 7; categories, 9-11; 
 idealism, 11-12, 15 n. ; Prac- 
 tical Reason, 19-20,57, 113; 39, 
 51,55,56; ethical system, 57 ff., 
 66; Juvalta's criticism of his 
 ethical system, 76-79; 81, 92, 
 97 n., 101, 102; on inter- 
 national law, 105-110; on 
 rights of animals, 1 10-1 11; on 
 love and justice, 112; relation 
 to Theism, ch. vn 
 
 Law, ethics in form of, 29 etc. ; 
 customary, 46 ; international, 
 60 n., 102 n., 104, 105-110 
 
 Leibniz, 4, 5 
 
 Liberty, and justice, 83 ff. 
 
 Littre, E., 118 n. 
 
 Locke, 3-5; Descartes and, 12; 
 and Berkeley, 13; on Tolera- 
 tion, 103 
 
 Logic, Formal, 4, 5 ff. 
 
 Love, spring of social action, 35 
 
 Lucretius, 91 
 
 Machiavelli, 100, 107 n, 
 
 Maistre, J. de, 104 
 
 Mill, J. S., 3, 5, 69, 92, 93, 103, 104 
 
 MUton, 29, 103 
 
 Moore, G. E., 20 ff., 31, 80, 97 
 
 Moses, 49 
 
 "Natural law," Hobbes's con- 
 ception of, 43 
 Neo-Platonists, 55, 92 
 Nietzsche, F., 71 
 
 Ontology, 12-13, 18, 120-122 
 
 Pain, paradox on, 24 
 
 Peace, Kant's perpetual, 107-109 
 
 Perfection as end, 64 n. 
 
 Plato, 22, 24, 52, 55, 95, 96, 103, 
 
 104, 123, 124 
 Platonism, 12-13, 20, 68 
 
 Platonists, Cambridge, 53, 54 
 Plotinus, 119 n. 
 Positivism, 111 
 Protagoras, 55 
 Pythagoreanism, 111 
 
 Rationalism, philosophical, 2 etc. 
 
 Read, C, 19, 25 
 
 Reciprocity, law of, 48-49, 60 
 
 Reinach, S., 105 n. 
 
 Rehgion, Hobbes's view of, 44; 
 and ethics, 69-70; and poli- 
 tics, 88-89; and ethical ends, 
 91 
 
 Renouvier, Ch., on mathematical 
 infinite, 16-17 ; Kantian ethics, 
 93-95 
 
 Robertson, G. C, 7; on Hobbes, 
 49-50 
 
 RusseU, B., 5-8, 13, 16-18 
 
 Sacrifice, 84 
 
 "Sanctions," 48, 73 
 
 Schopenhauer, 12, 13, 122-124 
 
 "Self-love," 35 
 
 "Self-reahsation," 63 
 
 Socialism, 75, 86 
 
 "SoUpsism," 15 
 
 Sophocles, 30, 64 
 
 Sorley, W. R., 23 n. 
 
 Spencer, H., 3, 5, 71, 92 
 
 Spinoza, 4, 25 ; Hobbes and, 49 n., 
 50 n.; 92; on "liberty of 
 philosophising," 103-105; on 
 international law, 106-108 
 
 Stoicism, 20, 39, 81 n., 92, 110 
 
 Teleology, 117-119 
 "Thmg-in-itself," 12-13 
 "Transcendental," 5; idealism, 
 12; element in knowledge, 120 
 
 Utihtarianism, 27, 35, 59 etc. 
 
 Vocation, individual, 101 
 
 War, primitive state of, 42 ; modi- 
 fies practicable ethics, 99; 
 aggressive, 109-1 10 
 
 CAMBRIDGE : PEINTBD BY JOHN CI.AT, M.A. AT THE UNITEBSITT PSB33.
 
 SELECTION FROM THE GENERAL CATALOGUE 
 
 OF BOOKS PUBLISHED BY 
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 Principia Ethica. By George Edward Moore, Litt.D., 
 
 Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Demy 8vo. 7s 6d net. 
 
 The Moral Life and Moral Worth. By W. R. Sorley, Litt.D. 
 
 Royal i6mo. Cloth, is net; leather, 2s 6d net. Cambridge 
 Manuals Series. 
 
 The Realm of Ends, Or Pluralism and Theism. The 
 
 Gififord Lectures delivered in the University of St Andrews in the 
 years 1907 — 10. By James Ward, Sc.D., Professor of Mental 
 Philosophy, Cambridge. Second edition, with Some Replies to 
 Criticisms. Demy 8vo. 12s 6d net. 
 
 A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, 
 
 with an Appendix of leading passages. By Hon. Bertrand 
 Russell, M.A. Demy 8vo. 7s 6d net. 
 
 Perception, Physics, and Reality. An enquiry into the 
 
 information that Physical Science can supply about the Real. 
 By C. D. Broad, M.A. Demy 8vo. los net. 
 
 The Presentation of Reality. By Helen Wodehouse, 
 
 D.Phil., Lecturer in Philosophy in the University of Birmingham. 
 Crown Svo. 3s net. 
 
 Pragmatism and French Voluntarism, with especial 
 
 reference to the Notion of Truth in the Development of French 
 Philosophy from Maine de Biran to Professor Bergson. By L. 
 Susan Stebbing, M.A. Crown Svo. 2s 6d net. (Girton College 
 Studies No. 6.) 
 
 The Principles of Understanding. An introduction to 
 Logic, from the Standpoint of Personal Idealism. By Henry 
 Sturt, M.A. Crown 8vo. 5s net. 
 
 The Pursuit of Reason. By Charles Francis Keary, M.A. 
 
 Demy Svo. gs net. 
 The Problem of Evil in Plotinus. By B. A. G. Fuller, 
 
 sometime Instructor in Philosophy at Harvard University. Crown 
 Svo. 7s 6d net. 
 
 The Origin and Propagation of Sin. Being the Hulsean 
 
 Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge in 1901-2. 
 By F. R. Tennant, D.D., B.Sc. Second edition. Crown Svo. 
 3s 6d net.
 
 The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin. 
 
 By F. R. Tennant, D.D., B.Sc. Demy 8vo. gs net. 
 
 The Concept of Sin. By F. R. Tennant, D.D., B.Sc 
 
 Crown 8vo. 4s 6d net. 
 
 The Philosophy of Biology. By James Johnstone, D.Sc. 
 
 Demy 8vo. 9s net. 
 The Vitality of Platonism and other Essays. By James 
 
 Adam, late Fellow and Senior Tutor of Emmanuel College, 
 Cambridge. Edited by his wife Adela Marion Adam. Demy 8vo. 
 7s 6d net. 
 
 Plato : Moral and Political Ideals. By Adela M. Adam, M.A. 
 
 Royal i6mo. Cloth, is net; leather, 2s 6d net. Cambridge 
 Manuals Series. 
 
 Six Essays on The Platonic Theory of Knowledge 
 
 as expounded in the later dialogues and reviewed by Aristotle. 
 By Marie V. Williams, late Marion Kennedy Student of Newnham 
 College. Crown 8vo. 3s net. 
 
 Neoplatonism in relation to Christianity. An Essay. 
 By C. Elsee, M.A. Crown Svo. as 6d net. 
 
 Roman Stoicism. Being lectures on the history of the Stoic 
 
 philosophy with special reference to its development within the 
 Roman Empire. By E. V. Arnold, Litt.D., Professor of Latin 
 in the University College of North Wales. Demy Svo. ios6dnet. 
 
 A Sketch of Ancient Philosophy from Thales to Cicero. 
 
 By Joseph B. Mayor, M.A. Extra fcap. Svo. 3s 6d. 
 
 The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Rendered into 
 English by Elizabeth S. Haldane, LL.D., and G. R. T. Ross, 
 M.A., D.Phil. Demy Svo. In two volumes. los 6d net each. 
 
 Elementary Logic. By Alfred Sidgwick. Crown Svo. 
 
 3s 6d net. 
 
 Berkeley and Percival. By Benjamin Rand. The corre- 
 spondence of George Berkeley, afterwards Bishop of Cloyne, and 
 Sir John Percival, afterwards Earl of Egmont. Demy Svo. With 
 frontispiece and 4 plates, qs net. 
 
 Cambridge University Press 
 
 C. F. Clay, Manager: Fetter Lane, London
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 LDURL 
 
 
 
 f ',« 
 
 »TS 
 
 Form L9-32)n-8,'57(.C8680s4)444
 
 3 1158 00661 6923 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAl I IBRARY FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 508 537 8