88 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



We believe this to be the explanation of a 

 difficulty which meets us at the very outset. After 

 more than one honest attempt to accept the schema 

 of systems which Dr. Martineau maps out, we are 

 obliged to return to our first impression, that it is 

 neither obviously appropriate as a classification of 

 ethical theories, nor, indeed, anything more than 

 an artificial grouping of some exceedingly interest- 

 ing essays round the central statement of the 

 author's own beliefs. 



The classification begins with a broad distinction 

 familiar to all students of the history of philosophy. 

 The Greek schools " were all essentially unpsycho- 

 logical and objective." "Objective" they certainly 

 were, but "unpsychological " is an unfortunate 

 word to choose as an equivalent. It, of course, 

 does not mean that they did not pay attention to 

 psychology since we are told that " Plato did not 

 fail to go back into the recesses of the human 

 mind for the springs of private and public life, 

 and the separating lines of right and wrong ; " and, 

 again, "The Greeks look for their whole moral 

 world wit/tin, among the phenomena of conscious 

 and self-conscious nature : " it can only mean that 

 they worked from the outward to the inward ; in 

 fact, that their attitude was, as M. Noire puts it, 

 " naively objective." These objective systems, Dr. 

 Martineau goes on, are either metaphysical or 

 physical according as reason or sense is supposed 



