Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/573

No. 5.] this is really the case, it is surprising that nations do not kill their prisoners and the captured wounded instead of feeding and caring for them, that they do not take everything they need in the hostile country without paying for it, that they do not utterly destroy all property and the entire population when they withdraw from the enemy's country.

Like many other philosophies, this type seeks to justify the ways of man to God. Professor Külpe promised to give us an ethics of war in general; instead, he seems to offer an apologia of Germany's conduct in the present conflict. His theory cannot have sunk very deep into the minds of the German people or government; otherwise, they could not complain of England's entrance into the war or of any of England's acts during the war. England too has some vital interests to defend, she too believes or at least can believe that the world will "an englischem Wesen genesen," that she has a great mission to perform, that history will go astray unless she holds her own and perhaps other peoples' own. On the basis of the Külpian theory, she has as good a case as Germany's; if she wins, she was right and the most worthy: to the victor belong not only the spoils but the moral crown. On such a theory no one can know which nation is worth while until the corpses have been counted: der Lebende hat Recht. And on such a theory ethics can do little more here than hold a post-mortem examination.

The problem of this dissertation is to place Hume's ethics with reference to the three chief schools in the English ethics of his time, rational intuitionalism, the moral sense school, and utilitarianism. Hume's relation to the rationalists presents little difficulty, except in so far as it is involved in what he has to say of the moral sense, but his relation to utilitarianism and the moral sense school is a somewhat controversial question. Commonly, of course, he is regarded as a utilitarian, and Green set the bad example, which later idealists have followed, of making no adequate distinction between Hume's theory of desire and that of Gay, Tucker, and other utilitarians of Hume's time. On the other hand, some critics have counted Hume as belonging to the moral school. The question is complicated by the fact that Hume left two statements of his Ethics, Book III. of the Treatise (1740) and the Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751). It has been common for critics to find a distinction between these two works, particularly regarding the place of benevolence in human conduct.

Miss Shearer takes the position that the Inquiry and the Treatise present identical theories and that both maintain a native tendency to benevolence. She therefore regards the omission of sympathy in the Inquiry,—the most striking difference between the two works,—as indicating merely that Hume, in the more popular book, eliminated an abstruse psychological theory intended