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task that lies before them-such a system has not yet been produced. But it is called for on all sides, with an emphasis the sense of which cannot be misunderstood. A new, realistic moral science is the need of the day-a science as free of superstition, religious dogmatism, and metaphysical mythology as modern cosmogony and philosophy already are, and permeated at the same time with those higher feelings and brighter hopes which a thorough knowledge of man and his history can breathe into men's breasts.

That such a science is possible lies beyond any reasonable doubt. If the study of Nature has yielded the elements of a philosophy which embraces the life of the Cosmos, the evolution of the living beings, the laws of psychical activity, and the development of society, it must also be able to give us the rational origin and the sources of the moral feelings. And it must be able to indicate and to reinforce the agencies which contribute towards the gradual rising of these feelings to an always greater height and purity, without resorting for that purpose to blind faith or to religious coercion. If a closer acquaintance with Nature was able to infuse into the minds of the greatest naturalists and poets of the nineteenth century that lofty inspiration which they found in the contemplation of the universe— if a look into Nature's breast made Goethe live only the more intensely in the face of the raging storm, the calm mountains, the dark forest and its inhabitants-why should not a widened knowledge of man and his destinies be able to inspire the poet in the same way? And when the poet has found the proper expression for his sense of communion with the Cosmos and his unity with fellow-men, he becomes capable of inspiring thousands of men with the highest enthusiasm. He makes them feel better, and awakens the desire of being better still. He produces in them those very ecstasies which were formerly considered as belonging exclusively to the province of religion. What are, indeed, the Psalms, which are described as the highest expression of religious feeling, or the more poetical portions of the sacred books of the East, but attempts to express man's ecstasy at the contemplation of the universe-the first awakening of his sense of the poetry of Nature?

II

The need of realistic ethics was felt from the very dawn of the present scientific revival, when Bacon, at the same time as he laid the foundations of the present advancement of sciences, indicated also the main outlines of empirical ethics, perhaps with less thoroughness than this was done by his followers, but with a width of conception which was not much improved upon in later days. The best thinkers of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries continued on the same lines, endeavouring to work out systems of ethics, independent of the imperatives of religion. Hobbes, Locke, Shaftesbury and

Paley, Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith boldly attacked the problem on all sides. They indicated the empirical sources of the moral sense, and in their determinations of the moral ends they mostly stood on the same empirical ground. They combined in varied ways the 'intellectualism' and utilitarianism of Locke with the 'moral sense and sense of beauty of Hutcheson, the theory of association' of Hartley, and the ethics of feeling of Shaftesbury. Speaking of the ends of ethics, some of them already mentioned the 'harmony? between self-love and regard to fellow-men which took such a development in the nineteenth century, and considered it in connection with Hutcheson's 'emotion of approbation,' or the 'sympathy' of Hume and Adam Smith. And finally, if they found a difficulty in explaining the sense of duty on a rational basis, they resorted to the early influences of religion, or to some inborn sense, or to some variety of Hobbes' theory of law, considered as the educator of the otherwise unsociable primitive savage. The French Encyclopædists and materialists discussed the problem on the same lines, only insisting more on self-love, and trying to find the synthesis of the opposed tendencies of human nature in the educational influence of the social institutions, which must be such as to favour the development of the better sides of human nature. Rousseau, with his rational religion, stood as a link between the materialists and the intuitionists, and by boldly attacking the social problems of the day he won a wider hearing than any one of them. On the other side, even the utmost idealists, like Descartes and his pantheist follower Spinoza, even Leibnitz and the transcendentalist-idealist' Kant, did not trust entirely to the revealed origin of the moral ideas, and tried to give to ethics a broader foundation, even though they would not part entirely with an extra-human origin of the moral law.

The same endeavour towards finding a realistic basis for ethics became even more pronounced in the nineteenth century, when quite a number of important ethical systems were worked out on the different bases of rational self-love, love of humanity (Auguste Comte, Littré, and a great number of minor followers), sympathy and intellectual identification of one's personality with mankind (Schopenhauer), utilitarianism (Bentham and Mill), and evolution (Darwin, Spencer, Guyau), to say nothing of the negative systems, originating in La Rochefoucauld and Mandeville and developed by Nietzsche and several others, who tried to establish a higher moral standard by their bold attacks against the current half-hearted moral conceptions, and by a vigorous assertion of the supreme rights of the individual.

Two of the nineteenth-century ethical systems-Comte's positivism and Bentham's utilitarianism-exercised, as is known, a deep influence upon the century's thought, and the former impressed with its own stamp all the scientific researches which make the glory of modern science. They also gave origin to a variety of sub-systems,

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so that most modern writers of mark in psychology, evolution, or anthropology have enriched ethical literature with some more or less original researches, sometimes of a high standard, as is the case with Feuerbach, Bain, Leslie Stephen, Wundt, Sidgwick, and several others. Numbers of ethical societies were also started for a wider propaganda of empirical ethics. At the same time, an immense movement, chiefly economical in its origins, but eminently ethical in its substance, was born in the first half of the nineteenth century and spread very widely under the names of Fourierism, Saint-Simonism, and Owenism, and later on of international socialism and anarchism. This movement was an attempt on a great scale, supported by the working men of all nations, not only to revise the very foundations of the current ethical conceptions, but also to introduce into real life the conditions under which a new page in the ethical life of mankind could be opened.

It would seem, therefore, that since such a number of rationalist ethical systems have grown up in the course of the last two centuries, it is impossible to approach the subject once more without falling into a mere repetition or a mere recombination of fragments of already advocated schemes. However, the very fact that each of the main systems produced in the nineteenth century-the positivism of Comte, the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, and the altruist evolutionism of Darwin, Spencer, and Guyau-has added something important to the conceptions worked out by its predecessors proves that the matter is far yet from being exhausted. Even if we take the last three systems only, we cannot but see that Spencer failed to take advantage of some of the hints which the evolutionist philosopher finds in the short but very suggestive sketch of ethics given by Darwin in The Origin of Man; while Guyau introduced into morals such an important element as that of an overflow of energy in feeling, thought, or will, which had not been taken into account by his evolutionist predecessors. If every new system thus contributes some new and valuable element, this very fact proves that ethical science is not yet constituted. In fact, it never will be, because new factors and new tendencies will always have to be taken into account in proportion as mankind advances in its mental evolution.

That, at the same time, none of the ethical systems which were brought forward in the course of the nineteenth century has satisfied, be it only the educated fraction of the civilised nations, hardly need be insisted upon. To say nothing of the numerous philosophical works in which dissatisfaction with modern ethics has been expressed, the best proof of it is the decided return to idealism which we see in all civilised nations, and especially in France. The absence of any poetical inspiration in the positivism of Littré and Herbert Spencer,

2 Sufficient to name here the critical and historical works of Paulsen, Wundt, Leslie Stephen, Guyau, Lichtenberger, Fouillée, De Roberty, and so many others.

and their incapacity to cope with the great problems of our present civilisation; the striking narrowness of views concerning the social problem which characterises the chief philosopher of evolution, Spencer; nay, the repudiation by the latter-day French positivists of the humanitarian theories which distinguished the eighteenth-century Encyclopædists-all these have helped to create a strong reaction in favour of a sort of mystico-religious idealism. The ferocious interpretation of Darwinism, which was given to it by the most prominent representatives of the evolutionist school, without a word of protest coming from Darwin himself for the first twelve years after the appearance of his Origin of Species, gave still more force to the reaction against naturism '—we are told by Fouillée. And, as always happens with every reaction, the movement went far beyond its original purpose. Beginning as a protest against some mistakes of the naturalist philosophy, it soon became a campaign against positive knowledge altogether. The 'failure of science' was triumphantly announced. The fact that science is revising now the 'first approximations' concerning life, psychical activity, evolution, the structure of matter, and so on, which were arrived at in the years 1856-62, and which must be revised now in order to reach the next, deeper generalisationssuccessive approximations being the very essence of the history of sciences-this fact was taken advantage of for representing science as having failed in its attempted solutions of all the great problems. A crusade in favour of intuitionism and blind faith was started accordingly. Going back first to Kant, then to Schelling, and even to Lotze, numbers of writers have been preaching lately 'spiritualism,' 'indeterminism,' apriorism,' 'personal idealism,' and so on-proclaiming faith as the very source of all true knowledge. Religious faith itself was found insufficient. It is the mysticism of St. Bernard or of the neo-Platonians which is now in demand. Symbolism,' the subtle,' the incomprehensible' are sought for. Even the belief in the mediæval Satan was resuscitated.3

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It hardly need be said that none of these currents of thought obtained a widespread hold upon the minds of our contemporaries; but we certainly see public opinion floating between the two extremesbetween a desperate effort, on the one side, to force oneself to return to the obscure creeds of the Middle Ages, with their full accompaniment of superstition, idolatry, and even magic; and, on the opposite extreme, a glorification of a-moralism' and a revival of that worship of superior natures,' now invested with the names of 'supermen' or 'superior individualisations,' which Europe had lived through in the times of Byronism and early Romanticism.

It appears, therefore, more necessary than ever to see if the present

See A. Fouillée, Le Mouvement idéaliste et la Réaction contre la Science positive, 2nd edition; Paul Desjardins, Le Devoir présent, which has gone through five editions in a short time; and many others.

scepticism as to the claims of science in ethical questions is well founded, and whether science does not contain already the elements of a system of ethics which, if it were properly formulated, would respond to the needs of the present day.

III

The limited success of the various ethical systems which were born in the course of the last hundred years shows that man cannot be satisfied with a mere naturalistic explanation of the origins of the moral instinct. He means to have a justification of it. Simply to trace the origin of our moral feelings, as we trace the pedigree of some structural feature in a flower, and to say that such-and-such causes have contributed to the growth and refinement of the moral sense, is not enough. Man wants to have a criterion for judging the moral instinct itself. Whereto does it lead us? Is it towards a desirable end, or towards something which, as some critics say, would only result in the weakening of the race and its ultimate decay? If struggle for life and the extermination of the physically weakest is the law of Nature, and represents a condition of progress, is not then the cessation of the struggle, and the industrial state' which Comte and Spencer promise us, the very beginning of the decay of the human race-as Nietzsche has so forcibly concluded? And if such an end is undesirable, must we not proceed, indeed, to a re-valuation of all those moral 'values' which tend to reduce the struggle, or to render it less painful? The main problem of modern realistic ethics is thus, as has been remarked by Wundt in his Ethics, to determine, first of all, the moral end in view. But this end or ends, however ideal they may be, and however remote their full realisation, must belong to the world of realities. They must be born out of it, and remain accessible to our senses, because modern man will not be taken in by mere words or by a metaphysical substantiation of his own desires. The end of morals cannot be transcendental,' as the idealists desire it to be: it must be real.

When Darwin threw into circulation the idea of 'struggle for existence,' and represented this struggle as the mainspring of progressive evolution, he agitated once more the great old question as to the moral or immoral aspects of Nature. The origin of the conceptions of good and evil, which had exercised the best minds since the times of the Zend Avesta, was brought once more under discussion with a renewed vigour, and with a greater depth of conception than ever. Nature was represented by the Darwinists as an immense battlefield upon which one sees nothing but an incessant struggle for life and an

♦ W. Wundt, Ethics, English translation in three volumes, by Professor Titchener, Prof. Julia Gulliver, and Prof. Margaret Washburn, New York and London (Swan Sonnenschein), 1897.

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