244 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



and the Good, as distinguished from their opposites. 

 They have no definition of the highest Good, which 

 seems to consist only in a process, be this set going by 

 the motive power of the world of ideas or the propelling 

 68. force of the principle of life. Both end by appealing 



Indefinite- 

 ness of 'the to an ideal or 'the Ideal,' of which they can never- 

 ideal as 



by n thele d theless give neither a definition nor an interpreta- 

 thmkers. lion. With this view they come near to the position 

 of other thinkers, such as F. A. Lange in Germany, or 

 T. H. Green in England ; perhaps without recognising 

 that they entangle themselves in the same difficulties 

 and dilemmas which we meet with in those other 

 speculations. 



The fact that there are psychological data involved 

 in moral judgments and crystallised in certain current 

 words and phrases which we continually use in everyday 

 life, and can as little dispense with in the philosophy 

 of mind as we can find room for them in the philosophy 

 of nature, has prompted a school of thinkers in Germany 

 to take up a purely descriptive or analytical position 

 in Ethics, combining this frequently with historical 

 studies : they propose to give a phenomenology of the 

 moral consciousness in the individual as well as in the 

 race. The beginnings of this, as I have already had 

 occasion to mention, are to be found in the writings of 

 Herbart and Beneke, which are accordingly now more 

 frequently referred to. This school studies pre-eminently 

 6 p. what it calls judgments of value as distinguished from 

 judgments of fact, norms of conduct as distinguished 



Germany. 



from norms of thought, prescriptive laws of what ought 

 to be, as opposed to constitutive laws of what is. 



