8 Ethics compared with Logic. 



possible, to find anywhere realized. Moralists 

 have deemed it a part of their business to in 

 quire into the foundations of moral judgments, 

 and even, in some cases, to correct and improve 

 them. It is as though logicians should under 

 take to establish, or even to remodel, those laws of 

 thought which they have hitherto accepted from 

 the general consciousness of mankind. Such in 

 quiries no more belong to logic than an inquiry 

 into the nature of space or the evidence of the 

 axioms belongs to geometry. And if ethics is to 

 take rank with logic as a science of pure observa 

 tion and analysis, it must be purged of these ex 

 traneous questions that range beyond the limits 

 of description and classification. &quot;With this limi 

 tation of its subject-matter would come, no doubt, 

 a diminution of interest ; since it has been pre 

 cisely by the problems thus excluded that morals 

 have always fascinated the deepest thinkers, and 

 withheld them (Aristotle alone excepted) from es 

 saying a descriptive ethics, the lack of which, as 

 when Bacon first deplored it, we must still make 

 good by the concrete illustrations of dramatic 

 poetry. But I am not maintaining that ethics 

 should be curtailed. I am concerned only with 

 its scientific character. And I think it evident 

 that, though ethics may, for all that, be a legiti- 



