If absolute intellectual scepticism means speechlessness, or cessation from thought, absolute moral scepticism means death, or cessation from activity. Life, like thought, is the constant refutation of scepticism. As the continued effort to think is the refutation of intellectual scepticism, the continued effort to live is the refutation of moral scepticism. We live by faith. The effort to live, the perseverare in esse suo, implies, in a rational or reflective being, the conviction that life is worth living, that there are objects in life, that there is some supreme object or sovereign good for man. Such a faith may be a blind illusion, as pessimism declares; but it is none the less actual and inevitable. The ordinary man, it is true, does not realise that he has this faith, except in so far as he reflects upon his life. His plan of life is largely implicit; he estimates the goods of life by reference to a silently guiding idea of the good. To press the Socratic question, Good for what? and thus to substitute for a blind unthinking faith the insight of reason, is to pass from ordinary to reflective thought. That life is worth living, is the postulate of life itself; why it is worth science.

living, is the question of ethics as a Now when this ethical question is urged, there is at once revealed a seemingly chaotic variety of goods, which refuse to be reduced to any common denominator. One man's meat is another man's poison. If the metaphysician is tempted to ask despairingly, in view of the conflict of intellectual opinion, What is truth? the moralist is no less tempted, in face of a similar conflict of moral opinion, to ask, What is good? What appears

good to me is my good, what appears good to you is yours; there is apparently no moral criterion. Here, at any rate, we seem to be reduced to absolute subjectivity. Each man appears to be his own measure of good, and no common measure seems possible. Yet the scientific thinker cannot, any more than the ordinary man, escape from faith in an absolute good. Like the ordinary man,

he may have his difficulties in defining it, and may waver between different theories of its form and content. But any and every theory of it implies the faith that there is such a thing. This moral faith is the matter constantly given to the moralist that he may endue it with scientific form. He cannot destroy the matter, he can only seek to form it; his task is the progressive conversion of ordinary moral faith, of the moral common-sense of mankind, into rational insight. It is his to explain, not to explain away, this moral faith or common-sense. That there is an absolute or ideal good is the assumption of every ethical theory-an assumption which simply means that, here as everywhere, the universe is rational. Ethics seeks to verify this assumption or to reduce it to knowledge, by exhibiting its rationality. Variety of opinion as to what the good is, is always confined within the limits of a perfect unanimity of conviction that there is an absolute good. Even the utilitarian, insisting though he does on the relativity of all moral distinctions, on the merely consequential and extrinsic nature of goodness, yet recognises in happiness a good which is absolute. Similarly, the evolutionist, with his wellbeing or welfare, sees in life, no less than the perfectionist or the theologian, "one grand far-off divine event." To lose sight of this, to surrender the conviction of an absolute human good, would be fatal to all ethical inquiry. Its spur and impulse would be gone. But ethics, like metaphysics, is a tree which, though every bough it has ever borne may be cut away, will always spring up afresh; for its roots are deep in the soil of human life. As the faith in a supreme good must remain as long as life lasts, the scientific effort to convert that faith into the rational insight of ethical theory must also continue.

4. The business of ethics, then, is to scrutinise the various ideals which, in the life of the individual and of the race, are found competing for the mastery. Life

itself is such a scrutiny; human history is one long process of testing, and the fittest or the best ideals survive. But the scrutiny of history is largely, though by no means entirely, unconscious. The scrutiny of science is conscious and explicit. Ethics, as moral reflection, institutes a systematic examination of human ideals, and seeks to correlate them with the true or absolute ideal of humanity. The accidental and the imperfect in them must be gradually eliminated, until, as the reward of long and patient search, the absolute good at last shines through. As logic or the theory of thought seeks, beneath the apparent unreason and accident of everyday thought and fact, a common reason and a common truth, so does ethics seek, beneath the apparent contradictions of human life, a supreme and universal good-the norm and criterion of all actual goodness.

Or we may say, with Aristotle, that ethics is the investigation of the final end or purpose of human life. The good (τὸ ἀγαθόν) is the end (τέλος, τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα),—that end to which all other so-called 'ends' are really means. Such a teleological view is necessary in the case of human life, irrespective of the further question whether we can, with Aristotle, extend it to the universe, and include the human in the divine or universal end. Human life, at any rate, is unintelligible apart from the idea of purpose; the teleological and the ethical views are one. Since moral life is a series of choices, and character or virtue is, as Aristotle said, a certain habit or settled tendency of choice, the ethical question may be said to be, What is the true object of choice? What object approves itself to reflective thought as unconditionally worthy of our choice? What ought we to choose? Now the objects of choice fall into two great classes,— ends and means, objects that we choose for their own sake, and objects that we choose for the sake of other objects. Some objects we judge to possess an absolute,

primary, and intrinsic value; other objects we judge to possess only a relative, secondary, and extrinsic value. But, strictly, there can be only one end, one object or type of objects to which we attribute absolute and independent value, one good that constitutes the several goods. Ethical system and unity imply such an ultimate and unitary good; and ethical thinkers, when they have understood their task, have always sought for this last term of moral value, this one end to which all other so-called 'ends' are merely means, and which they have therefore called by the proud name of the Good (rò ἀγαθόν).

It is to be remembered, however, that the moral life is, like the psychical life generally, rather an organic growth than a mechanism or fixed arrangement. Like the organism, it preserves its essential identity through all the variations of its historical development; it evolves continuously in virtue of an inner principle. To discover this constant principle of the evolution of morality is the business of ethics. The task of the ethical thinker is not to construct a system of rules for the conduct of life

-we do not live by rule-but to lay bare the nerve of the moral life, the very essence of which is spontaneity and growth away from any fixed form or type. Each age has its own moral type, which the historian of morality studies; and the hero of an earlier age is not the hero of a later. Neither Aristotle's μeyaλófvxos μεγαλόψυχος nor the medieval saint will serve as our moral type. The search of ethics is for the organising principle of morality, for a principle which shall explain and coordinate all the changing forms of its historical development.

Nor are we to commit what we may call the 'moralist's fallacy' of confusing the scientific or reflective moral consciousness with the ordinary or naïve. The principles of the moral life, we must remember, are not to any great extent explicit; its ideals are not clearly realised

in the consciousness of the plain man. To a certain extent, of course, the ethical life is a thinking life-up to a certain point it must understand itself; it is not to be pictured as parallel with the physical life, which proceeds in entire ignorance of its own principles. But its thought need not go far, and the business of ethics is not to substitute its explicit theory, its rational insight and comprehension, for the implicit and naïve moral intelligence of ordinary life. Nor is the proof of an ethical theory to be sought in the discovery, in the ordinary moral consciousness of any age or community, of such a theory of its life. That life is conducted rather by tact, by a practical insight of which it cannot give the grounds. This was the feeling even of a Socrates, who attributed such unaccountable promptings to the unerring voice of the divinity that guided his destiny. The moral life precipitates itself in these unformulated principles of action; we acquire a faculty of quick and sure moral judgment, as we acquire a similar faculty of scientific or artistic judgment. This ability comes with "the years that bring the philosophic mind," it is the ripe fruit of the good life.

5. Ancient and modern conceptions of the moral ideal compared: (a) Duty and the chief good.Modern moralists, it is true, prefer to raise the question in another form, and to ask, not "What is man's chief end?" but "What is man's duty; what is the supreme law of his life?" The right is the favourite category of modern ethics, as the good is that of ancient. But this is, truly understood, only another form of the same question. For the good or chief end of man does not fulfil itself, as the divine purpose in nature does; man is not, or at least cannot regard himself as, a mere instrument or vehicle of the realisation of the purpose in his life. His good presents itself to him as an ideal, which he may or may not realise in practice: this is what dis