INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 61 



The conscious articulation of genuinely modern 

 tendencies has yet to come, and till it comes the 



* ethic of our own life must remain undescribed. 

 But the system of morals which has come nearest 



f to the reflection of the movements of science, de 

 mocracy, and commerce, is doubtless the utilitarian. 

 Scientific, after the modern mode, it certainly 

 would be. Newton s influence dyes deep the moral 

 thought of the eighteenth century. The arrange 

 ments of the solar system had been described in 

 terms of a homogeneous matter and motion, worked 

 by two opposed and compensating forces : all be 

 cause a method of analysis, of generalization by 

 analogy, and of mathematical deduction back to 

 new empirical details had been followed. The im 

 agination of the eighteenth century was a New 

 tonian imagination; and this no less in social 

 than in physical matters. Hume proclaims that 

 morals is about to become an experimental science. 

 Just as, almost in our own day, Mill s interest in a 

 method for social science led him to reformulate 

 the logic of experimental inquiry, so all the great 

 men of the Enlightenment were in search for the 

 organon of morals which should repeat the physical 

 triumphs of Newton. Bentham notes that physics 

 has had its Bacon and Newton; that morals has 

 had its Bacon in Helvetius, but still awaits its 

 Newton ; and he leaves us in no doubt that at the 

 moment of writing he was ready, modestly but 



