Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/95

No. 1] He constantly speaks of Reason in the manner of the century of Butler and Kant. For him, Reason is a purely cognitive faculty, external to the emotional side of our nature, that like a deus ex machina regulates and harmonizes impulses and emotions.

Writers on the metaphysics of ethics, as Dr. Rashdall tells us (pp. 61, ff.), can no longer afford to ignore anthropological and psychological accounts of moral origins. Would it not be best to accept these accounts at their face value, and see if they do not point in the direction of a sufficiently objective ethics, rather than oppose to them what really amounts to an eighteenth-century rationalism? Furthermore, may it not be possible to develop a satisfactory metaphysics of ethics and philosophy of religion by arguing that the logic immanent within the instincts and emotions comes to fuller self-consciousness in reflective morality? Would this not better coincide with modern conceptions of God than Dr. Rashdall's old-fashioned view of Reason, and be equally objective? And if our moral judgments be regarded as due to a higher development and synthesis of instincts and emotions, are they not a fuller and hence truer expression of Reality and of God? Mr. Bosanquet's highly suggestive conception of teleology as immanent within and arising from a mechanical world (The Principle of Individuality and Value, chaps. III-V) seems capable of application to this field of evolutionary morality.

This book, as is expressly pointed out in the preface, is neither a history of ethics nor a text book on ethics as such. While it deals with the historic types of ethical theory, it deals with them by classes, paying no attention to strictly chronological order, and making no attempt at a completeness which would only confuse the reader for whom an Introduction is specially prepared. It is not a text book on ethics, partly because its method is that of a presentation and criticism of historical systems, and because it attempts to deal only with the central problems of ethics. In a space equal to about two thirds of that of Sidgwick's well-known History of Ethics the majority of classical systems, ancient and modern, are passed in review, classified under the rubrics: the Ethics of Conditionate Morality, and the Ethics of Absolute Morality. The presentation is followed by a criticism intended to exhibit the system of St. Thomas Aquinas as the culmination and complete truth of all that other moralists have seen and reported.

The most notable characteristic of the author's work is the desire which it exhibits to be fair to all parties, according to the principles of the master, of whom the author writes: "St. Thomas left behind him many works. In none of them is a harsh word against an adversary to be found." Unfortunately this zeal for fairness has led the author into what appears to the