conception will occupy all of the chapters to come. In this chapter I shall indicate its tendency by contrasting it with the orthodox conception of ethics as represented by the orthodox moralist.

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What does "the man in the street" understand by ethics? Or, if I may choose a spokesman nearer home, what is the conception of ethics in the mind of the average undergraduate of an American college1 who has just registered his name for the next term's course? Something like this, I venture. Ethics, as he understands it, is "a study of right conduct". The purpose of the course in ethics is to teach the student "what is right". This means, in the first place, that he expects to derive from the course an exposition of the established principles of morality; principles hardly less established than the principles of physics or the principles of law, and hardly less supported by authority. And then from these principles he expects to derive, or to have authoritatively derived for him, a compendium of rules, a guide to life, which will once for all mark out for him the (straight and narrow) path of duty. Further, perhaps, he expects to receive expert solutions of certain nice questions, such as, Is a lie ever justifiable? though he is not quite prepared to substitute the expert solution for his own common sense.

But what he also expects, perhaps above all, is that the teacher will "exercise a moral influence", and that his teaching will also be preaching. He is to "speak as one having authority". If the tone of authority be missing the pupil will suspect the morality. Nay, I have known pupils who would authoritatively instruct their teacher in this matter. I come here to be influenced, their attitude has

1 I am reminded that the point of view of the English student is very different; and certainly that of the German student. Even in the United States the attitude I have described in the text is more characteristic of the "college student" than of the student of the larger "university ". Yet the average American undergraduate, even in the larger universities, remains a "college student ".

seemed to say, and now I find the responsibility imposed upon me. I come for sound doctrine, and I get problems. In other words, I come for edification, and I am compelled to think.

There is a curious difference between ethics and other subjects in the college curriculum. The teacher of other subjects is bound to enlighten his pupils but he is under no obligation to convert. The teacher of ethics must not only convert, he appears to be authorised to mould the character of his pupils. And for the matter of that, after the pattern of his own, which is to serve as an example. And what is more, the average pupil, by no means in this respect a refractory pupil, expects his character to be moulded. And further, he will impose this as an obligation, and bestow the authority, upon any other persons, including his fellow-students, who set out to be moral. In their view the moral is inseparable from the didactic. As a further point of difference I may remark that while professors in other subjects are crowned for discoveries, discoveries in the field of ethics are more likely to be damned.

Such are the implications of the definition which makes ethics a study of right conduct. As a study of right conduct the ethics thus defined is what I have called orthodox ethics, in the sense that it conceives of morality in terms of right and wrong. This view of ethics is by no means confined to the man in the street. The man in the street is only adopting the traditional assumption of the schools. For widely as these may differ with regard to the ethical motive and the spiritual quality of the ideally good man (of which something will be said in the next chapter), there seems to be on the part of each school an attempt to show that, in the end, in terms of practical conduct, its own good man will satisfy the requirements of the orthodox standard. As J. S. Mill will show, the utilitarian is in practice as orthodoxly moral as any Kantian rationalist or any intuitionist. Their motives may differ, their practice is the same. So that it seems plausible to say, with Wundt

and Leslie Stephen, that men agree generally as to what is moral and differ only as to why it is so; and therefore that the only function of ethics is to find the reasons for what we already know to be right.

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As against this orthodox conception, I propose now to offer, not so much a definition of ethics (the ending of the term suggests a "science", and it is my purpose to show that there is no such science) as a conception of moral philosophy; and less perhaps a conception than a picture of the moral philosopher, or the moralist. The moralist I will present as a naturalist who studies, not conduct, but persons.

To make the motif of this clearer I will repeat the query put to me several years ago by a clever and quick-witted woman; a thoroughly humane and cultivated person, who, however, as a trained and zealous student of nature, was disposed to take the point of view of natural science on its own word as the final criterion of wisdom and of truth. From previous conversations I had guessed that she found the profession of philosophy rather amusing if also somewhat mystifying. Finally came the question: in a world so full and various with fascinating things, such as glaciers, sea-anemones, and (I forget her third item, but I will insert) shovel-headed sharks, how could any really live person be interested in the abstractions of philosophy?

I will admit that the question floored me. It was a question which (after twenty years of teaching philosophy) my Freudian sub-conscious self preferred not to have raised. Though never a collector myself, and having only the slightest interest in the difference between one rock, one bird, one leaf, or one tree, and another, I had none the less envied the naturalist, or natural scientist, with his collections and his museums. If he were asked what he was doing in the world he had always something to show for it. He could entertain his friends with items of

interest which normal persons could understand and appreciate. I could entertain mine only with-"abstractions". What in the world, then, is the philosopher really studying?

The answer, which came to me only long afterward, I have suggested above: the philosopher studies persons. I am not here proposing an academic definition of philosophy -or at best only one more. It will be sufficient to suggest that all the distinctively philosophical problems-the problems of logic, of psychology, of ethics, of the theory of knowledge, and no less of metaphysics-arise from the fact that there are persons in the world. With no persons in the world there would be no problems for philosophy but only problems for science, to be solved neatly and surely by scientific method. Hence the scientist would prefer to ignore the fact of persons, or at any rate to leave it out of his calculation. As a "modern scientist" in particular, he claims to treat the world impersonally; that is to say, to observe and report the objective facts in the world before him and to say nothing of the fact that it is he who observes 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 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 Commandents, the Code of Hammurabi, the Categorical Imperative, and the Golden Sayings of Epicurus. 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 weak

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