and here to ethics of Naturalism,

appropriate place when we have failed to find an independent basis for action,

The question which remains to be put may be expressed in these terms: Can we find in human nature (taken either alone or in connection with its environment) any indications of the end of human conduct, or, in other words, of the principle on which human beings "ought" to act? and if so, in what direction do these indications point, and what is their significance? The answer to this question will thus necessarily depend on the view we take of the constitution of man and his relation to his environment. And I purpose to bring this discussion within the necessary limits by considering the ethical consequences of one only of the two views into which philosophical opinion is divided.

Now the fundamental principle of division in philosophical opinion lies in the place assigned to reason in human nature.1 According to one theory, man is essentially a sensitive subject, though able to reason about his sensations-that is, to associate, compound, and compare them. He is supposed to be built up of sense-presentations associated with feelings of pleasure and pain. Recipient of external impressions which persist in idea and are accom

1 Opinion is also divided according to the place assigned to reason in the world, this principle of division corresponding almost exactly with the former.

al ethics.

panied by pleasure or pain on his part, and thus followed by other ideas and impressions, man's mental constitution is explained without attributing to reason any spontaneous or productive function.1 The other view differs from this in as distinguished attributing spontaneity to reason-making it, in from Rationone way or another, the source of forms of thought, principles, or ideas. The former may be called the Naturalistic, the latter the Rationalistic view of man: from that follows a Naturalistic or Natural ethics, from this a Rationalistic or Rational ethics. Into both these theories, in a theoretical as well as in an ethical aspect, the historical turn of thought which has characterised recent inquiry has introduced a profound modification. On the basis of Naturalism Naturalism, we may either look upon man as an vidualistic individual distinct from other individuals, as was done by Epicurus and Hobbes and the materialists of the eighteenth century, or we may consider the race as itself an organism, apart from which the or historical. individual is unintelligible, and look upon human nature as having become what it now is through a long process of interaction between organism and environment, in which social as well as psychical and physical facts have influenced the result. This is the view to the elaboration of which Comte and

1 Thus it is the object of Helvétius's first discours "De l'esprit" to prove that physical sensibility and memory are the only productive causes of our ideas.

B

either indi

Rationalism either individualistic

Darwin and Spencer have in different ways contributed. What makes the historical method of importance philosophically, is not the mere fact that it traces a sequence of events in time, but the fact that, by doing so, it is able to look upon each link in the chain of events as necessarily connected with every other, and thus to regard as a system-or, rather, as an organism-what previous empirical theories had left without any principle of unity.

A similar movement of thought has introduced a like modification into the Rationalistic theory. According to older doctrines, the individual reason is mysteriously charged with certain à priori principles which are to us laws of knowledge and of action; whereas the form of Rationalism which is now in the ascendant resembles the theory of natural evolution in this, that as the latter finds the race more real than the individual, and the individual to exist only in the race, so the former or universal- looks upon the individual reason as but a finite

istic.

manifestation of the universal reason, and attempts to show the principles or constitutive elements of this universal reason or consciousness in their logical or necessary connection-leaving open to empirical investigation the way in which they have gradually disclosed themselves in the in

1 Comte, by connecting ethics with biology; Darwin and Spencer, by the doctrine of evolution.

dividual human subject, and in the expression of the collective life of the race. Thus, as Natural Ethics is divided into an individualistic and an historical view, a similar distinction might be made in Rational Ethics, though in this case it would be more difficult to follow out the distinction in detail; and many ethical systems cannot be said to have kept consistently either to one side of it or to the other.

In the following discussion I shall investigate the ethical theory which is founded on the basis of Naturalism-working out and criticising in somewhat greater detail that form of the theory which, from the agreement it lays claim to with the results of modern science, plays so important a part in contemporary philosophical thought.

20

PART I.

THE INDIVIDUALISTIC THEORY.

CHAPTER II.

EGOISM.

Definition of IT is difficult to give an exact definition or even Naturalism. description of what I have called the "natural" view of man. Perhaps it may be best defined, negatively, as the view which denies to reason any spontaneous or creative function in the human constitution. For this definition, if it still leaves the positive description wanting, will at least make the classification into "natural" and "rational" exhaustive and mutually exclusive. At the same time it is to be noted that, on the theory of Naturalism, reason is not supposed to be excluded from all share in determining questions of conduct or the choice of ends. It would, indeed,