Methods of Ethics. 21 



tions are to be recognized as laws of conduct.&quot; 

 But that moral rules have no other foundation 

 than their felicific consequences is so far from 

 self-evident, so foreign to popular thought and 

 modes of expression, to say nothing of moral 

 philosophy, that the proposition could only 

 emerge as a final result, not stand as the first 

 datum, of a truly scientific ethics. Accordingly, 

 the scientific character of morals and it is that 

 we are now investigating will not be affected by 

 the contingent issues of Mr. Spencer s venture- 

 Borne enterprise. Should he, like Locke, fail in 

 his promised deduction of rules of conduct, the so- 

 called &quot; rational ethics&quot; will have lost its doughti 

 est champion ; should he succeed, his deductions 

 will afford no proof of the evolution of empirical 

 into rational ethics until it has first been estab 

 lished that the logical movement has really been 

 in the ethical sphere that is, until it has been 

 shown that the counsels of prudence and precepts 

 of utility, which he professes to have deduced 

 from the laws of life and the conditions of exist 

 ence, are synonymous with the moral laws intui 

 tively recognized by mankind. But this, unfor 

 tunately, has been a qucestio vexata since the very 

 beginning of moral philosophy, and it is ap 

 parently no nearer settlement to-day than at its 



