Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/192



THICS with its twofold aim, of intellectual mastery and practical control, runs danger of being doubly incompetent. To follow differences to the vanishing point and to construe theoretically such concepts as the good, personality, freedom, virtue, etc., is one problem; to turn to practical issues and implications and to make ethics persuasive and effective in the actual shaping of conduct and character, is quite another. The relation between these two problems was conceived rather naively by moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hobbes offered his ethics as a practical antidote to the impending dangers of civil war and social anarchy; Henry More defines the aim of ethics as follows: "By means of the reading and thinking over of its precepts the human mind is to be set afire with the love of virtue, that it may breathlessly pursue virtue, and at last gain virtue and with it a true, substantial happiness." We think of the relation in quite a different manner. We hold it unfair to judge the worth of an ethical system in terms of an increase in the output of moral excellence. That problem is laid aside for the educator and the social reformer. And yet we demand something that is not reducible to strictly intellectual terms of consistency or ingenuity; that something is maturity of insight, vitality of conceptions, closeness to life in the living. A threefold test must be passed: the assumptions must be sound, the principles must be worked consistently and harmoniously, and there must be that peculiar intentness and richness of treatment by means of which a problem yields all its implications. This test will be most severe whenever a subject has its roots alike in theoretical and practical interests. Not only that, but the danger of a lapse is doubled. In ethics there is double danger of either subjectivism or a metaphysical occultism that is pretentious and overreaching. Subjectivism with its irreverent denial of one absolute truth and one absolute value seems to