called the moral sense. If this view be correct ethics must be a purely inductive science. Its primary object will be to collect, record, and systematize the moral precepts of normal individuals, and to note and explain the real or apparent deviations in those of abnormal individuals. General propositions, analogous

to the laws of other inductive sciences, will no doubt be discovered, but they will have no practical importance. We do not need the generalization of optics to tell us more readily or certainly what things are luminous, nor will general ethical truths enable us more easily to discover what conduct is right. Ethical writers accustomed to their own critical point of view do not seem to realize how widely this view (which, as Professor Sidgwick says, is at once "ultra-intuitional" and "ultra-empirical "), is held by ordinary persons. It is the current ethical philosophy, not only of the nursery and the pulpit, but of the average plain man. Yet the ground on which it rests is in the highest degree uncertain. Our moral percepts or quasi-percepts are often vague, indefinite, and, worse still, conflicting. Unlike the percepts of the senses, they do not bear strict examination. The more I attend to a sense-percept, so long as the organ does not become fatigued, the clearer it becomes. By repeating the observation under varying conditions I become more and more sure. But the immediate and unreasoned utterances of conscience do not normally become more definite by concentrating attention on them. Nor do we find anything like a

general agreement in these apparent percepts, such as we find in the percepts of the senses. The ethical intuitions of the vast majority of the human race are avowedly erroneous, or at least extremely imperfect. It is only those of the civilized and Christianized races that have any claim to be regarded as correct. Even among these there is great want of unanimity. Let us ask in a general company the question whether it is right to use the formula "not at home" in some specified set of conditions where it is not literally true, and we shall find that the replies are various, and that they do not rest for the most part on unambiguous intuitions, but palpably depend on a process of reasoning.

As a matter of fact, this "perceptional intuitionism" is not the teaching of any school of thinkers. Systematic theologians reject it as well as philosophers. Certain general propositions are held to be of higher certainty than the particular quasi-percepts of conscience, and in order to know the moral quality of an act, we have to bring it under one or more of these universals. We feel the need of a deductive process, and our practical syllogism takes some such form as this:

"To assist others in trouble is right (or obligatory).

"This is such an act of assistance.

"Therefore, this is right (or obligatory).”

The truth of the minor premise may sometimes be so readily recognized, that the process may take the

form of a percept. But this is seldom the case. Reflection generally discloses that the minor premise is itself guaranteed by a further process of reasoning, though this is seldom difficult to construct. The more onerous task is to determine how the major premise is guaranteed.

Obviously deduction alone cannot justify it. We must come at last to some moral judgment which cannot be inferred from any higher one. The ultimate ethical major premise, or premises, must be due either to induction or to intuition.

Induction may take as its starting point definite objective facts, which are capable of proof, e.g., the conduciveness of certain acts to pleasure. But we cannot in this way prove more than that such acts do conduce to pleasure; we cannot show that they ought to be performed, or that they are ethically right. We could only prove their obligation or rightness by starting from perception of obligation or rightness in the individual cases. Such perceptions do not exist, for moral quality is not a fact of perception; it has no relation to space and time.

We may, however, start not from facts of perception, but from the moral opinions of men. By collecting and generalizing these we may arrive at moral laws, which will represent the normal opinions of ourselves and others as to what is morally good or the reverse, in the same way as the principles of art represent the normal opinions as to what is beautiful. This is much the same kind of induction as that which

Aristotle tells us Socrates applied to ethics. It rests wholly on facts of feeling, which cannot be justified or criticized. Feeling cannot test its own validity. And feelings vary. It is only by arbitrarily excluding the savage and the man of earlier civilizations that we can get any approach to uniformity of moral feeling. Besides, there is much less uniformity in our own moral approbation and disapprobation than is commonly supposed. Theologians and philosophers differ between themselves, as well as the civilized man from the savage. Women approve and disapprove differently from men. If we ask what virtue they estimate most highly, to which they would postpone all others, the woman and the man, the philosopher and the hero, the philanthropist and the theologian, will give different replies.

It seems then a somewhat hopeless task to base our ethics on inductive inferences from the facts of moral feeling, if we regard ethics as a science of the same kind as the positive sciences, which give us definite conclusions resting on a more or less certain basis of axioms or observations, as the case may be. If, however, we are willing to regard it as parallel rather to æsthetics than to these, we may well be contented with the basis thus described. But like æsthetics we shall expect ethics to give us no absolute principles, only to tell us what normally meets with the approval of cultivated moral perception, and to explain why. We shall have to come back to the attitude of Aristotle, who lays down that abstract accuracy cannot

be expected in ethics, the subject matter of which does not permit of demonstrative certainty. Although by induction we cannot prove that any end, say pleasure, ought to be the end of conduct, we can prove that most wise men think it so, and we must be content with this result. We shall have to allow that desirable means merely what is desired by those whose opinions we value most; and we shall have to take a purely relative view of the meaning of obligation and of right.

The alternative to induction as the guarantee of our ultimate major premises must be intuition. If these premises are not obtained by generalization from particular facts or particular judgments, they must be recognized as true immediately on mere inspection, like the axioms of mathematics. Their validity must be guaranteed in the act of understanding them. Such is the theory of those philosophers who are called Intuitionists or Intuitionalists. It makes the science of ethics essentially deductive, and assimilates it in some degree to the science of geometry.

It will be noted that in this view we must be prepared to find our theoretical conclusions sometimes at variance with received moral judgments. Induction may serve as a check, but it is not valid against careful deductive conclusions from moral axioms.

$ 4. The Science of Ethics.

Science examines its data and proves their reality and validity; it classifies them, arranging them so