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nesses) 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-gentleman. 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. 1 wonder how they could expect to have much to say on the subject of morality,

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 comprehension of motives is what is commonly, but very accurately and significantly, called "moral insight".

A consideration of the meaning of moral insight will help also to answer our next question. For I may be asked whether the attitude which I have described as "naturalistic" does not involve a cooly supercilious and self-conceited treatment of one's fellows as "specimens", and thus an immoral attitude in the moralist himself. Not, I should reply, in one who studies them with moral

insight. The factor of moral insight introduces into the relations between the student of human nature and the object of his study exceedingly perplexing questions. I am inclined to say indeed that he who can explain just how I know my neighbour will have answered the last question in metaphysics. Thus much, however, seems clear one who studies the ways and points of view of men comprehendingly can hardly be coolly supercilious, much less self-conceited, however naturalistic and critical. There is no incompatibility between the critical attitude and personal interest and affection. It may even be said that each implies the other, and that those whom we question most curiously we love most warmly. Nor between personal affection and a sense of humour. We love the little children just in the fact that they delight and amuse us. And as for the "bitter humour" with which we annihilate an enemy-this seems to contain an element of paradox. For to make it effective, and really annihilating, it seems necessary first to control and cool, perhaps also to conceal, the bitterness; while if you really loathe the person in question you may fear to condescend to humour. Humour is too compromising.

In any case it seems that the study of man introduces considerations hardly contemplated in the study of nature. The sea-anemone, however curious and beautiful, is disposed of when he is described and named. He has nothing to say in reply. To stamp your fellow's point of viewas "oriental", for example-is only to learn that the oriental view has something to say about the meaning of life for you and me. Hence for those who choose study as a reposeful avocation it is wiser to study sea-anemones than to study men.

The next question is more technical. Naturalistic ethics, it will be asked,-what is this but plain psychology? In other words, if the moralist is the "student of human nature" why not call him a psychologist? My instinctive reply would be that I don't care what you name him. For I greatly suspect that these distinctions of disciplines

-between ethics and psychology, ethics and politics, ethics and economics, psychology and logic, psychology and philosophy, logic and epistemology, etc., etc.—without a laborious chapter on which no Teutonic treatise can get under way-are but so many legal fictions, or academic fences, set up by each professor to prevent a neighbouring professor from borrowing his chair. But since a failure to answer might leave an ambiguity I will put it thus: I am quite ready to abandon the distinction between psychology and moral philosophy (but not to allow moral philosophy to be "reduced" to psychology), if only the psychologist will assume the responsibility of cultivating moral insight and undertake to use it as a method of psychology. The offer is not likely to be accepted.

Stated more formally, the issue is as follows. The traditional distinction between psychology and ethics is that, while both are (say) studies of men, psychology studies a man for what he is, ethics for what he ought to be. But now, what do you mean by what a man is? What a sea-anemone is, it seems that we can state clearly enough; since we are careful not to endow the seaanemone with imagination. Hence it is just what it is, a determinate present fact and nothing more. But when we ask what a man is we discover (if we use moral insight) that he never is just what he is as a present determinate fact. Every man not absolutely dead is endowed with some imagination; and this means that what he does now and what he is now, is guided more or less by what he judges it worth while to do and worth while to be, i.e., by what he is trying to be and ought to be. And thus the "is" and the "ought to be", the psychological and the moral, are so vitally connected that neither can even be stated apart from the other.

I may put the point differently by saying that, in contrast to the sea-anemone, the man more or less knows what he is; and this knowing ought to be a vital part of the man for any study that calls itself "psychology." Say, then, that A is a liar ; and add to this that A knows that he