22 Empirical Ethics. 



first discussion between the youthful Socrates and 

 the venerable Protagoras, when, in the whirl of 

 debate, the protagonists were unwittingly carried 

 round to opposite sides, and each was in the issue 

 amazed to find himself attacking the position he 

 deemed impregnable and espousing the cause he 

 repudiated as false. 



But there are, as we have seen, two types of 

 the sciences of nature the deductive and the 

 empirical represented respectively by astrono 

 my and botany. And if at present ethics cannot 

 claim to rank with the deductive, may it not 

 at least find a place among the natural sciences 

 of the empirical kind ? Failing to justify this 

 -, position, ethics, it would seem, must be stripped 

 of its scientific pretensions, and banished to that 

 dim region of ontological abstractions which ag 

 nostic metaphysicians keep for their gnostic rivals 

 a limbo of intellectual inanities, of ghosts of 

 human speculation (vanitas vanitatum\ which, 

 like the unaccomplished works of nature, re 

 mains forever &quot; abortive, monstrous, or unkindly 

 mixed.&quot; 



There is, however, reason to believe that physical 

 ethics, empirical if not deductive, is by no means 

 an impossibility. It is certain that, apart from 

 Mr. Spencer, this is the method of ethics generally 



