CHAP, xin DARWINISM IN ETHICS ALEXANDER 125 



nobles and the poor, to Tory and Kadical instincts. So 

 it is to be with the typical bourgeois philosophy of 

 intuitionalism. Idealists and empiricists are to agree 

 sweetly in destroying it. Its excellent intentions shall 

 not excuse it one cruel blow, in view of its hopeless and 

 irritating limitations. 



Having affirmed so strongly the competency of 

 naturalism, Mr. Alexander has to face a question which, 

 in our judgment, presses hard upon all naturalistic 

 ethics. What room is there for ethics at all upon 

 the premises of naturalism ? What do we mean by 

 speaking of right and wrong, of moral good and 

 moral evil, in a world of blind laws and mere facts 

 and necessary processes ? Mr. Alexander, like Mr. 

 Stephen, faces the question and gives the same 

 provisional answer. Primarily, we are dealing with 

 acknowledged facts, viz. with those moral judgments 

 which, as a matter of fact, are current. In the first 

 instance, therefore, Mr. Alexander takes over moral 

 opinion as he finds it, and, like Mr. Stephen, tells us he 

 is concerned to analyse it rather than to verify it to 

 systematise it, as we might perhaps interpret, rather 

 than to apply any more radical test. Self-consistency 

 is indeed a legitimate test, though but a negative test of 

 truth ; and if he had confined himself to requiring that 

 morality should be self-consistent, coherent, systematic, 

 Mr. Alexander could have done no possible injustice 

 to the moral consciousness. As we read on, however, 

 we feel that his provisional attitude is very soon 

 departed from. The utterances of the moral conscious- 

 ness are cut short its dicta are edited or expurgated 

 with a view to securing harmony, not with each other, 

 but with a deterministic view of the universe borrowed 

 from physics. True, the frontier of morality is extended 



