Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/521

503 the genial and Epicurean worldliness of a Montaigne with the rigorism of a Pascal! What an instructive contrast may be drawn between Dante as the last great expression of mediæval views of life and Goethe as a supreme representative of modern humanism, etc.! This historical material, of course, will furnish illustration and suggestion for that tentative system of value-judgments which it must be the aim of ethics to establish only in so far as there is some recognizable identity or continuity amongst ethical values now and then, and some degree of spiritual community of personal life traceable through the historical mutations of society. Every great historical ethical theory has expressed and summed up some potent and vital phase in the concrete spiritual evolution of man. Ethics must continue the endeavor to interpret and systematize intrinsic value-judgments with reference to their evolution.

The point I wish to make is that, since the past from which our general types of morality derive is a recorded past accessible to us and no longer, as for primitive man, a vanished and unknowable past, we can make progress in ethical insight by reflectively bringing our existent types of moral judgment into relation with their forbears.

The Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle remains a model for ethical investigation to-day. In this work we find a systematic exposition and classification of the actual values that were normative for the best type of Greek in the best days of Greek civilization. What is needed to-day in ethics is a similarly empirical and systematic treatment of intrinsic values, but with reference to their historical evolution. The latter reference is absent from Aristotle, since he, like Greek thinkers generally, was devoid of the historical sense. Indeed, for the Greeks a definite historical consciousness scarcely existed, whereas history weighs on us as a burden which we hardly know how to lighten and certainly cannot cast off without due consideration. Let me illustrate this point very briefly. The controlling ethical notion in Greek life can perhaps be described as that of the fullest harmony of the intellectual and the sensuous elements in man. The fundamental aim was to realize and enjoy to the full all the natural capacities of action