28 Ethics not a Science like Biology. 



pre-simian ancestors ; but what material is there 

 for determining their morals what but the indi 

 vidual preconceptions of the inquirer ? And of 

 the morality of even our own race, in its pre-his- 

 toric stage, we are in similar ignorance. What 

 marks of virtue, e.g., do you find in the shape, or 

 size, or cubic capacity of the Neanderthal skull? 

 There is no fossil pre-human morality. And 

 for lack of it the ideal of physical ethics remains 

 unrealized. 



The outlook for the &quot; science &quot; of ethics grows 

 less promising at every new survey. With which 

 ever of the sciences we compare it, some reason 

 emerges for excluding it from them. Its data do 

 not carry it back with biology to the dawn of 

 life. It is not, like mathematics, synthetic and 

 demonstrative. And if it is to take rank with 

 logic, it must forego every function except 

 classification and observation, and be content to 

 pass rather as a formal discipline than a real 

 science. 



Perhaps, however, we have been over-hasty in 

 rejecting physical ethics, or, rather, the physical 

 method of ethics. Though in its extant form of 

 an imaginary development of moral from im 

 aginary pre-moral phenomena it overleaps itself 

 and, with vaulting ambition, falls to the other side, 



