serves them. This, he insists, has nothing to do with the facts observed.

The philosopher suspects the contrary. He, therefore, will study, not only the world, but also, and particularly, the scientist himself, the knowing person. And when he considers the knowing person in connection with the world known, what strikes him most forcibly is that, while the world known is for science supposedly one, the knowing persons are many and various even within the camp of scientists. And the supposedly impersonal and scientific view of the world is only one among others. This variety and multiplicity of personal view is grievous to the scientist, since it lies in the way of a calm acceptance of scientific authority. But the true philosopher delights in it.

Thus it comes about that the more reflective philosopher loves best to study philosophy itself in the form of the history of philosophy; in which the variety of human motive is seen in its most reflective form. For him the history of philosophy is the study of philosophy par excellence. The scientist, on the other hand, is comparatively little interested in the history of science. The history of science is not science but only gossip about science-antiquarian and polite. From the scientific point of view the persons composing the scientific world are of no importance. Their personal motives and experiences have nothing to do with the facts which it is their duty to discover. What is important is the fact itself; and when the fact is established the discoverer may well be forgotten. Such is the point of view of science in contrast to the point of view of philosophy.

Now ethics, or moral philosophy, is most of all a study of persons. I shall not pause here to specify in what

1

manner or degree ethics differs from psychology and each again from the broader study of philosophy. What I would point out (in answer to the inquiry of my naturalistic friend) is that the moralist is also a naturalist. He too, if you please, is a collector of specimens. Only, his specimens are persons and their points of view. They cannot, unfortunately, be preserved in jars; they must be stored less securely in the mind of the collector. But if it still be suggested that he is "playing with abstractions", then I shall ask to be introduced to something really concrete. And as for the interest of the collection-I do not doubt that glaciers and sea-anemones are stimulating to an intelligent imagination, but what may be claimed for them I claim a fortiori for persons. Indeed I cherish the prejudice that the interest in persons stands for a somewhat nicer taste.

The true moralist is collecting whenever he is awake. And not merely such items as the Ten Commandments, the Code of Hammurabi, the Categorical Imperative, and the Golden Sayings of Marcus Aurelius. These serve mainly as tags for his collection. His choicest bits are those personal idiosyncracies, tricks of manner and speech, and personal weaknesses (which the moralist mindful of the code of his profession will always hesitate to treat as weaknesses) which all unwittingly reveal the personal point of view. When Bishop Butler speaks of God as "the Lord and Proprietor of the universe", I see at once his conception of moral authority: God is for him an English landed-gentlemen. Hence the moralist's choicest field is where truly well-bred persons never venture-the field of gossip. When Mrs. Jones tells him what Mrs. Brown said to Mrs. Smith and what Mrs. Smith said in reply, and

then adds confidentially her own opinion of both, the moralist notes the presence of three interesting points of view (not forgetting that of Mrs. Jones) whose differences and mutual relations he deems worthy of respectful analysis. And nothing delights him more than a conversation between two persons of whom neither grasps what the other has in mind. One of my most instructive specimens of this kind is a conversation between a Hindoo gentleman and a Christian lady, each of whom found in the other a true type of "heathen". The exasperated Hindoo gentleman guessed very well how he was being regarded, but the Christian lady remained blissfully unconscious. She had no inkling of the horror aroused in her auditor by her frequent references to "the precious blood of Christ". "In India", he assured me very earnestly afterwards, "it has been thousands of years since we have believed in human sacrifice.”

Such may be said to constitute the moralist's private collection. For his professional collection he must explore the world. And to some extent literally; for I fancy that only a residence for some time in a foreign country can enable one fully to appreciate how differences of custom and ways of living, apparently superficial, stand for deeper and genuinely moral differences of outlook upon life. As a retired scholar and thinker, however, his chief field of exploration must be the field of culture of literature and art-made accessible to him through the medium of libraries and museums. Here of course his most important specimens are his fellow-moralists, especially those preserved in the history of moral philosophy-such as Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics, Spinoza, Hobbes, Shaftesbury and Bishop Butler, Hume, the two Mills and Herbert Spencer, Kant and T. H. Green, Schopenhauer

and Nietzsche. For among his points of view these are perhaps the most articulately ethical. Yet it is after all the intensely personal character of these moral philosophies that makes them significant. Had Spinoza really succeeded in demonstrating morality geometrically none of us would take the trouble to read him.

Important again for the moralist are the literatures of history and anthropology, especially of those anthropologists who with sympathetic imagination have not forgotten that they were studying human beings. A rich field for his purpose is the field of literary criticism. There he will find a valuable collection of points of view already "prepared" for him by the literary critic; whose criticism, as I shall point out later, is fundamentally moral criticism. But an indispensable field of research for the moralist of the present day is the field of serious fiction. Nowhere else will he find such a variety of person and motive or a form of literature which more inevitably reveals the perceptive capacities of its creators-for though the characters be fictitious (I fancy they are never quite so) the writer is sure to be real. I have heard of moralists who never read novels. I wonder how they could expect to have much to say on the subject of morality.te line Such is the naturalistic moralist. For him it takes all kinds of men to make a moral world, and the more kinds the better. Orthodox morality admits only one kind, and that the right kind.

§ 5

I will now anticipate some of the consequences of this view in the form of answers to a few of the more obvious questions.

The first is more likely to be an accusation. And so, I shall be told, what you mean by morality is "the ethics of naturalism"! To this I reply that in the common acceptation, in which naturalism is opposed to idealism (and is perhaps a euphemism for materialism), naturalism is just the reverse of what I mean by morality. In this acceptation I prefer to identify morality with supernaturalism. I have drawn the moralist as a naturalist because I wish to insist upon his empirical and naturalistic preoccupation with concrete individuals, i. e., with persons. But I might well have drawn him, after the fashion of Shaftesbury and Butler, as "a student of human nature". In these terms I may best put the answer to the question.

For between the study of nature and the study of human nature there lies an important difference. The student of nature may contemplate his specimens lovingly and indulge in curious speculations about the play of forces which has made them what they are, but he hardly ventures—not if he be a strictly scientific student of nature-to ask how it would seem to be a glacier, a sea-anemone, or a shovelheaded shark. The sea-anemone is a living thing; what, then, is its attitude towards life? Orthodox science discourages such questions and he who values his position in scientific society is careful not to suggest them. Let us, says the scientist drily, stick to the facts. Now it is precisely this forbidden kind of question that is uppermost in the mind of the naturalistic moralist; and it is precisely this power of sympathetic imagination-the power of seeing others as they see themselves and ourselves as others see us-that measures one's capacity as a moralist and also constitutes one's own morality. This while 117.

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