Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/574

 H. SIDGWICK, OUTLINES OF HISTORY OF ETHICS. 573 to be, but only visions of a passing perfection, ' moving about in worlds not realised'. But the great lesson alike of Greek and of early Christian ethics remained to be drawn by more modern philosophy. The law of nature or of God considered as the supreme canon of morality is to be carefully distinguished from law as understood by juris- prudence or by natural science. The great delusion which led to casuistry and favoured hypocrisy was the supposition that the law of God and nature was a completed code needing only to be applied by continuous deduction, or a set of facts requiring to be detected by persistent observation. That law is of infinite paragraphs, but one principle, and that principle itself is not a general order, but a test of all action, not a command to do this or that but a condition which all conduct must conform to on pain of failing to be moral. The moral law such is the special contribution of modern philosophy alike in Hobbes, Locke and Kant can only be stated in a formal shape : any concrete or material rules fall short of the universality that an ethical law requires. The law of ethics is but one, and in its baldest form bids us have regard to the universal in all we do. To lay down this as the prime fact of morality and to analyse its presupposi- tions was the achievement of Kant. And he is thus the founder for modern times of idealistic as opposed to realistic ethics. He affirms most clearly that the characteristic of moral action is that it proceeds from a being implicitly the member of a com- munity a community unlimited in time and space including (in the language of ancient thinkers) all rational beings. Of this supreme principle altruism is an application : and Kant lays the foundation (or analyses the intuitional datum) on which Bentham and Comte equally build. Some modern writers have been led to say in consequence that all ethics is intrinsically social ethics. Yet even if we allow the designation, we must add that for ethical theory the society in question must be conceived as universal and ideal in the first instance, and only secondarily as real and finite. It is the failure to recognise this distinction between absolute ethics and the relative ethics which shades into jurisprudence that constitutes the chief defect of the common versions of utili- tarianism. It is the merit of Plato, Hobbes, Kant and Mr. Spencer to have given it a clear expression. The account of Greek ethics is like the rest of the book sure to teach much even to those who are familiar with the ground it traverses. Beginning with the first efforts to isolate ethical conceptions, Mr. Sidgwick says a little about Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Democritus. As to Pythagoreanism, there is probably insufficient prominence given to its mathematical formalism (e.g., "harmonious equality" is scarcely an adequate rendering) ; and we miss any note of that insistence on purity or asceticism to which many pre-Socratic thinkers bear witness. The picture given of the labours of the Sophists and Socrates,