Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/371

 ABSTRA CT AND PR A CTICAL ETHICS 357

this center in morals and politics, as I have tried to show, is nothing else than human character itself.

In advocating the importance of taking such a stand with a view to effective practice, I must not, of course, be understood to be requiring that all would-be reformers should leave the platform and the committee room and devote themselves to an arduous course of moral philosophy. In reform, as elsewhere, we must have division of labor ; and those who are the best thinkers may likely enough be unfitted for effective action. My contention is that if they are it will be for other reasons than the nature of their ideas, and that those whose profession it is to carry ideas into practice will not be the worse but in every way the better for possessing themselves by every means in their power of the results of the best thinking on the subject of the ends and ideals of human life.

Ethical societies aim, as I understand them, at bringing these results within the reach of busy people so that he who runs may read. In pursuing this aim they may require to have recourse to propositions of a high degree of generality if you like, of abstractness. In this respect their teaching will be color- less and forbidding. "Philosophy," says Hegel, " paints her grey in grey," and this is not less true of ethical philosophy than of philosophy in general. But in stating its formulae and calling upon thinking people to understand them, ethics is not forsaking reality and losing touch with practice. On the contrary, its most recent formulae represent the attempt to rise above the half-truths of current reflection, to embrace more of reality, and so by setting man's life in a truer perspective to give it greater significance. So far from its being a matter of indifference to practice with what ideas we approach the problems of individual and social life, it is this that makes all the difference. " Conception, says Walter Pater, " fundamental brain-work that is what makes all the difference in art." And what is true of the fine arts is, I venture to think, equally true of that finest of all the arts, the art of life. J. H. MUIRHEAD.

LONDON, ENGLAND.