Literary Notices. lxxxiii 



Bowne's Ethics. 1 



The two leading thoughts claimed by the author for this work 

 are : first, the necessity of uniting the intuitive and experience schools 

 of ethics in order to reach any working system ; second, that the aim 

 of conduct is not abstract virtue but fulness and richness of life. 



The author defines his point of view clearly enough in denying 

 the relevancy of a study of the psychological faculties concerned in 

 the production of moral ideas, the nature of conscience, etc., to ethics 

 proper, which must confine itself to the study of our moral ideas 

 themselves with their postulates and the application of the theory thus 

 reached to concrete conduct. In fact he states explicitly that, 



i. The pretended deduction of moral ideas from non-moral is 

 purely verbal and fictitious. 



2. The pretended reduction of moral ideas to non-moral elements 

 is likewise purely verbal and fictitious. 



3. The actual order of graded development in the mental life 

 cannot be understood as a modification of its earliest phases, but only 

 as the successive manifestations of a law immanent in the whole de- 

 velopment. 



4. No psychological theory concerning the origin and genesis of 

 our ideas, moral or otherwise, can be used as a test of truth, or as a 

 method of discovery, at least so long as the general trustworthiness of 

 reason is allowed. 



After warning against the confusion of the doctrine of goods [the 

 good] with a coarse utilitarian conception which looks only to external 

 and marketable values the author reaffirms Schleiermacher's position 

 that good, duty, and virtue are the fundamental moral ideas and that 

 their order is that just given. Duty ethics and the goods ethics are 

 reconciled as follows : " Our constitution makes various goods possi- 

 ble. These are the various forms of well-being founded in the essen- 

 tial structure of our minds and in their external relations. As such 

 they are natural and not moral. They are not expressions of charac- 

 ter, but only of nature. But while themselves only natural, they fur- 

 nish the condition of all moral activity." " The moral is the natural 

 glorified and realized by rational freedom." As applied to conduct, 

 he concludes, consequences are the criteria of material Tightness; but 

 to the agent belongs the duty and merit of its realization. 



We cannot extend this summary to the body of the work, but 



■Bowne, B. P. The Principles of Ethics. Harper and Brothers. 



