what direction do these indications point, and what is their significance? The answer to this question will thus necessarily depend on the view we take of the constitution of man and his relation to his environment. And the special problem before us is the ethical consequences of one only of the two main views into which philosophical opinion, at present as in the past, is divided.

the ethics of

Naturalism.

These two views may be designated Realism or and here to Naturalism and Idealism or Spiritualism; and it is Naturalism. with the former alone that the present enquiry is concerned. In modern thought the theory now commonly called Naturalism may be said to occupy the position and to carry on the traditions of the theory of Materialism which, in its strict meaning, is no longer prominent in philosophical controversy. Naturalism, as the theory is held to-day, does Meaning of not assert that material atoms and their motion constitute the sole reality. As regards ultimate reality it professes that it has nothing to say; it deals with phenomena only. But, in its interpretation both of the world and of man, it carries on the opposition to Idealism. The completest account of the world as a whole which is possible is held to be the description of it in physical terms the spiritual factor in reality is held to be dependent, if not illusory. And the explanation given of man's life is similar. The psychology now associated with Naturalism is essentially the

B

1

same as that which Democritus in the ancient world and Hobbes in the modern set forth as a suitable outwork of their materialistic theory of reality. Sensory impressions leave certain residua behind them called ideas; and these, as Hume put it, by "a kind of attraction, which in the mental world will be found to have as extraordinary effects as in the natural," are held to give rise to the whole content of consciousness. Naturalism is thus a psychological as well as a cosmological theory, and may be tested by its adequacy to explain the mind of man as well as by its competency as an account of the world. "As long as association of ideas (or sensory residua) is held to explain judgment and conscience, so long" (it has been said) "may naturalism stand." 2

1 Treatise of Human Nature, book i. part i. sect. iv., ed. SelbyBigge, p. 12.

2 Ward, art. "Naturalism," Encyclopædia Britannica, 10th ed., vol. xxxi. p. 88b. To this article reference may also be made for the history of the term. Its usage both in philosophy and in literature has undergone considerable modifications. The literary use is related to the philosophical, but not closely enough to require examination here, nor to justify the classification of the first edition of the present work under 'Schöne Literatur und Kunst' in a German book-catalogue. As a philosophical term 'naturalism' has been used for a theory such as Bruno's, in which God is identified with nature (cf. Adamson, Development of Modern Philosophy, ii. 44); but its earliest usage as a technical term seems to have had reference to the acceptance of a 'religion of nature' (cf. Lechler, Engl. Deismus, p. 31). It thus came to be used in the Deistic controversy as opposed to Supernaturalism, and in this way even to be identified with Rationalism. This

either indi

Into this theory of Naturalism, as well as into the corresponding but opposed theory of Idealism, the historical turn of thought which has characterised recent enquiry has introduced a profound modification. On the basis of Naturalism, we may Naturalism, either look upon man as an individual distinct vidualistic from other individuals, as was done by Epicurus and Hobbes and the materialists of the eighteenth century, or we may consider the race as itself an organism, apart from which the individual is unin- or historical. telligible, and look upon human nature as having become what it now is through a long process of interaction between organism and environment, in which social as well as psychical and physical factors have influenced the result. This is the view to the elaboration of which Comte and Darwin and Spencer have in different ways contri

usage survives in the term 'Natural Theology,' where 'natural' means 'rational' as opposed to 'revelational.' But the substantive ‘naturalism' is no longer used as implying 'rationalism.' It means simply the theory explained above: that the description of the world in physical terms, and of mind in terms of sensation and association, is (not necessarily the ultimate truth but) the most adequate account of things of which human reason is capable. As the early usage of the term cited by Lechler is from an unpublished work, so also its earliest use as equivalent to materialism which I have seen is in a work of two hundred years ago only recently printed-The Philosophical Regimen of Shaftesbury (written between 1698 and 1712, and first published in 1900). In this work (p. 21) the author contrasts his own theory with that of the atomists, to whom he refers as persons who count themselves naturalists."

Idealism either individualistic

buted.1 What makes the historical method of importance philosophically, is not the mere fact that it traces a sequence of events in time, but the fact that, by doing so, it is able to look upon each link in the chain of events as necessarily connected with every other, and thus to regard as a system -or, rather, as an organism-what previous empirical theories had left without any principle of unity.

A similar movement of thought has introduced a like modification into the Idealist theory. According to older views (represented by the doctrine of innate ideas,' and by the ethical theory of Intuitionism), the individual reason is mysteriously charged with certain à priori principles which are to us laws of knowledge and of action; whereas the form of Idealism which is now in the ascendant resembles the theory of natural evolution in this, that as the latter finds the race more real than the individual, and the individual to exist only in the race, so the former or universal- looks upon the individual reason as but a finite

istic.

manifestation of the universal reason, and attempts to show the principles or constitutive elements of this universal reason or consciousness in their logical or necessary connexion-leaving open to empirical investigation the way in which they

1 Comte, by connecting ethics with biology; Darwin and Spencer, by the doctrine of evolution.

have gradually disclosed themselves in the individual human subject, and in the expression of the collective life of the race. Thus, as the Ethics of Naturalism is divided into an individualistic and an historical view, a similar distinction might be made in Idealist Ethics, though in this case it would be more difficult to follow out the distinction in detail; and many ethical systems cannot be said to have kept consistently either to one side of it or to the other.

In the following discussion I shall investigate the ethical theory which is founded on the basis of Naturalism-working out and criticising in somewhat greater detail that form of the theory which, from the agreement it lays claim to with the results of modern science, plays a leading part in contemporary philosophical thought, and exercises no inconsiderable influence upon the popular consciousness of morality.