Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/299

 286 CRITICAL NOTICES I In the Introduction (pp. 1-14) ethics is denned as the supreme " science of norms " ; logic, in the last resort the only other thinking". The best method of arriving at the principles of morality is found to consist in a combination of the empirical and the speculative methods. The author proposes to begin, there- fore, with an empirical statement of the facts first of the historical development of morality itself, and then of the philosophical systems of ethics which have sprung out of actual morality and reacted on it. After the " inductive preparation " of the first two sections (i. "The Facts of the Moral Life," pp. 15-233; ii. "Sys- tems of Moral Philosophy," pp. 234-371) comes the systematic construction of the remaining two, of which the first is concerned with principles (iii. "The Principles of Morality," pp. 372-510), the second with their application (iv. " The Departments of Moral Life," pp. 511-577). Section i. is, in effect, a treatise on anthropology in relation to ethics. The most general results of the author's investigation are a " law of three stages" of moral development and a " law of the heterogony of ends ". According to the first of these laws, religious ideas are in the beginning the presiding influence in the development of morality ; afterwards, moral ideas detach them- selves and become independent ; finally, there is a return to the primitive unity of the spiritual life, "general human aims" are formed, and the differences among national moral conceptions tend to disappear. The "bearer" of religious and moral con- ceptions is "the general consciousness". The primitive social .group is " the tribe," from which proceeded in diverging develop- ment the narrower circle of the family and the wider circle of the state. At first religion was not distinct from morality, or morality from law and custom, or these from each other. Eeligion, never- theless, is to be placed first in the order of development, because, while moral customs for the most part can be traced to acts of religious ceremonial, the origin of religion, like the origin of language, escapes us. Those thoughts and feelings are religious that are directed towards a world in which ideals are realised. When man has made for himself religious ideals, of which there are two kinds, those that finally take shape as belief in a perfect personality, and those that culminate in the thought of a " moral world-order," these ideals, by the authority they exercise, modify social customs ; and so, under their influence, morality is formed. It is not to be supposed that moral rules were made with any view to their utility either to the individual or to society. The assumption that morality was thus consciously developed vitiates all the ordinary theories, which err by ignoring "the heterogony of ends". Motives now intelligible are un- questioningly assumed in order to explain the actions of the men of former times. The origin of the State, for example, is sup- posed to be explained by the need men had of protection. In
 * ' Normwissenschaft," being subordinated as "the ethics of