of further development? (3) What is the nature of acts which are designated as right and wrong? Why are they right and wrong? Is there anything in them, any quality or attribute, that makes them right and wrong, or that makes men call them so? If so, what is it?

All these are questions for the moralist to decide. He must calmly, carefully, and impartially investigate the facts, and, if possible, explain them; he must search after the principles or laws underlying them, if there be any; he must unify them, if that can be done. He must analyze and explain both character and conduct, the inside and outside of action, the mental factor, conscience, or moral judgment, and the physical factor, the act which it judges. He must tell us what they are, and why they are so; he must account for them, show us their raison d'être, indicate to us the place which they occupy in the system of things.

4. The Data of Ethics. We have stated in a general way what is the subject-matter with which our science deals, and how it is to be treated. Let us now attempt to show what differentiates ethical. facts from other facts. Let us imagine that a person has killed a fellow-creature with malice aforethought. We call the deed murder, we pronounce moral judgment upon it; we say, It is wrong, wicked, reprehensible. The same act, however, may be looked at from the physical or physiological point of view. The energy stored up in the brain cells of

the murderer was liberated by certain currents coming from the periphery, and discharged into efferent nerves connected with certain muscles, which produced the movement of the arm and hand holding the weapon of destruction. And the blow on the victim's skull so injured his brain and the vital functions dependent upon the nervous system as to cause death. The prosecuting attorney, ignoring the physiological and even moral factors involved, may look at the act purely from the legal standpoint. To kill a person with malice aforethought is a crime prohibited by law and punishable by death. The psychologist may try to explain the psychology of the entire affair. Certain motives were aroused in the mind of the murderer by the behavior of his future victim. These motives became more and more intense, and the inhibitions weaker and weaker, until a resolution was finally formed which led to the act.

We see, one and the same circumstance may be examined from different points of view; each individual thinker may select particular elements in it for study, and ignore the others. The physicist looks at the rainbow and tries to understand its physical conditions. I may contemplate it and call it beautiful, and then ask myself what makes it beautiful; why is it that the contemplation of such a phenomenon arouses a peculiar æsthetic feeling in me? The science of æsthetics is appealed to for an answer to this question. In ethics we do not care for the physical or physiological causes which

have produced the acts, motives, and characters with which we are concerned; all these have interest for us only because, and in so far as, we stamp them with a certain value, only because they bear a certain relation to the human soul, only because they provoke peculiar ethical feelings and judgments in us. Acts which are capable of exciting such judgments fall within the province of the science of ethics. There could be no science of ethics if no one ever approved and disapproved of things, if no one ever called things right and wrong. If the contemplation

of certain acts and motives did not arouse in us ethical feelings and judgments, there could be no science of ethics because there would be no facts for ethics to study. We might perhaps be perfect physicists, physiologists, astronomers, and even philosophers, but we should never pronounce moral judgment upon an act. That we place a value upon things, that we call them right or good, wrong or bad, is the important fact in ethics, is what makes a science of ethics possible.1

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5. The Subject-matter of Ethical Judgment. We said before that moral judgment was pronounced upon acts, but, we must add, not upon all acts. We do not feel like judging unless the act is the product of some conscious being like ourself. We do not call an earthquake or a cyclone right or wrong; as Martineau says, "we neither applaud the gold-mine

1 See Höffding, Ethik, III, and his Ethische Principienlehre; Münsterberg, Der Ursprung der Sittlichkeit, pp. 10 ff.

nor blame the destructive storm."1 The child and the savage may applaud and condemn such occurrences and inanimate objects, but this is most likely because they regard them as endowed with soul, or because they have heard others do so. Generally speaking, we nowadays limit our judgments to the actions of conscious human beings. We expect the act to have a mental or psychical background. When the act is the expression of a conscious human being, we feel like judging it morally. But when we are told that the agent did not control it, that it occurred without his willing it, or that he was not. capable of reasoning and feeling and willing in a healthy manner at the time of its performance, then we withhold our judgment. We do not praise or blame the movements made in an epileptic fit, or hypnotic trance, or in sleep, or reflex actions over which the person has no power. Nor do we condemn or approve of the acts of a lunatic. But in case any of the acts under consideration are the necessary consequents of some previous conduct of the doer, which, we believe, he might have avoided, we pronounce judgment upon them, or at any rate upon him. him. Wherever we are convinced that the acts were purely mechanical, that is, physically determined, and not accompanied by consciousness, we do not judge them morally. But whenever consciousness is present in the performance of the act, we are tempted to judge.

1 Types of Ethical Theory, Vol. II, p. 20.

Let us therefore say that the subject-matter of ethical judgment is human conduct, that is, consciously purposive action.1 We must not forget, however, that this was not always the case, and is not even now, perhaps, universally true. But it makes no difference to us here upon what the mind. pronounces its judgments. The important thing for ethics is that such judgments are pronounced at all, and it is the business of the science to examine every fact or act which is judged ethically, or is capable of being so judged.

6. Definition of Ethics. Ethics may now be roughly defined as the science of right and wrong, the science of duty, the science of moral principles, the science of moral judgment and conduct. It analyzes, classifies, describes, and explains moral phenomena, on their subjective as well as on their objective side. It tells us what these phenomena are, separates them into their constituent elements, and refers them to their antecedents or conditions; it discovers the principles upon which they are based, the laws which govern them; it explains their origin and traces their development. In short, it reflects upon them, thinks them over, attempts to answer all possible questions which may be asked with reference to them. It does with its facts what every science does with its subject-matter: it strives to know everything that

1 See Seth, A Study of Ethical Principles, chap. i; Spencer, Data of Ethics, chap i; Muirhead, A Manual of Ethics, pp. 15-17; Martineau, op. cit., Vol. II, chap. i.