250 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



72. 

 Two 



theories of 

 the Good : 

 ends and 

 duties. 



worths; on the other we have a brilliant and emphatic 

 proclamation of the claims of individuality and per- 

 sonality, of a phenomenon which in many modern 

 scientific and economic theories has been pushed 

 into the background and lost sight of. But neither 

 of these two interesting lines of thought has really 

 done much to attack the central ethical problem — 

 the problem of the Good. This still stands before 

 us in its two-faced aspect : first, the Good as a thing to 

 possess or to strive for (Gilterlehre) ; and secondly, Good 

 as a predicate of human will and conduct {Tugencl- und 

 PJlichtenlehre) and of everything connected therewith : 

 on the one side the purpose, on the other side the 

 character of human activity. It is, however, perhaps 

 not too much to say that this dualism, this twofold 

 aspect of the moral problem, has been more clearly 

 defined in recent ethical literature in Germany as well 

 as in this country ; it has been brought more closely 

 home to the philosophical consciousness of the age. In 

 this country the task has been performed, as I stated 

 above, by Henry Sidgwick ^ in his ' Methods of Ethics,' 



^ During the last years of the 

 century and smce that time a 

 large number of treatises on the 

 subject of ethics have appeared in 

 all the three countries, testifying 

 quite as much to the interest 

 taken in the subject as to its 

 intricacy and to the inherent, as 

 it seems to many, wellnigh in- 

 soluble paradoxes and dilemmas 

 which reveal themselves to closer 

 critical study such as has been 

 started in this country by Sidg- 

 wick in the 'Methods of Ethics' 

 and by Bradley in 'Ethical Studies.' 

 The psychologj' of the moral sense 

 is not so simple as it appeared be- 



fore these two thinkers took up 

 the subject, nor even as Paulsen 

 has put it in the article referred 

 to in the text. This must become 

 abundantly evident to readers of 

 German ethical literature in the 

 important work of Prof. Geo. 

 Simmel, whose ' Einleitung in die 

 Moralwissenschaft ' (2 vols., 1892- 

 1893) may be singled out among 

 a great many other publications 

 mostly belonging to the present 

 century. Indeed there is perhaps 

 a danger of casuistry forming too 

 prominent a chapter of ethical 

 theory. 



