Sheldon — The Literature of Ethical Science. Ill 



gist, if not even the conventional psychologist. In this 

 respect, therefore, — or perhaps not "therefore," — the 

 writers in ethics have striven to be " up to date," and to feel 

 themselves at one with the rest of the scientific world. We see, 

 for instance, how one of these scholars announces it as the very 

 starting-point or basis of his whole problem: "1st, und in 

 wie feme ist bei einem consequent durchgefiihrten Determi- 

 nismus, eine ethische Weltanschauung moglich? " — Carneri. 



But lano-uage here must be taken with excessive caution. 

 In reality there is not one but rather a number of problems 

 involved. In the first instance, the issue may have to do 

 purely with what we might term subjective experience and to 

 what extent a freedom of the will exists strictly within the 

 consciousness itself. It is the old mooted battle ground : 

 must the will follow the strongest motive ; does causality 

 reign here as it does in the outer world? Again, on the other 

 hand, the problem may rather apply to the issue whether the 

 soul or consciousness is one of the determining factors in the 

 whole of experience — objective and subjective alike, — or 

 whether it simply accompanies the events of objective expe- 

 rience somewhat as if it were a function of the objective 

 world. 



Now a scholar may be a " Determinist " on one of these 

 problems and an " Indeterminist " on the other, or he may 

 be "Indeterminist" or "Determinist" on both of them. 



On the whole one might say that in former days the dis- 

 cussion centered more on the subjective side ; as to whether 

 the will had to obey the strongest motive. All this went 

 with the old-fashioned Faculty-Psychology. But the exciting 

 aspect of the problem since the coming in of the new physics 

 and the doctrine of the conservation of energy, has been 

 rather as to whether the soul itself exerts any actual influence 

 on the " outer world," as it is called; and is to be considered 

 as a factor in the whole realm of causation. We are in the 

 most intricate problem as to the relation between body and 

 soul, or as to whether there is a distinction between soul and 

 body at all. 



The teacher in ethics is very much concerned with this 



