OF THE GOOD. 



187 



ethical tone and bearing, though it does not, any more 

 than they did, occupy itself specifically with the ethical 

 problem in its various aspects as they had been 

 elaborately defined and discussed by thinkers in this 

 country. 



Whereas the latter had clearly established, on new 

 foundations and enriched with new matter, two philoso- 

 phical sciences, the science of Psychology and the science 

 of Ethics, the system of Comte disregards these sciences 

 altogether. Certainly it does so in its earlier phase, 

 though it appears as if, on more mature consideration 

 and in the later stages of his thought, Comte had felt 

 the necessity of making good to some extent what in 

 the beginning of his career he had left undone. On the 

 other side he not only gave to a large school of philo- 

 sophical thought the special name and the distinctive 

 character of Positivism, but he was also the founder of 

 the modern science or doctrine of Sociology. He was so 

 pre-eminently in virtue of the fact that the phenomenon 

 which he studied was human society, humanity in its 

 aggregate, human beings in their " together " and not 

 isolated.* From this as a datum he did certainly 

 advance towards a conception of human nature as such ; 

 but he did not follow English thinkers by beginning 

 with the study and analysis of the individual human 

 mind, of the inner self, and by moving onward from 



respects so also with regard to the 

 ethical problem, Lotze occupies a 

 peculiar and intermediate position. 

 In his view metaphysics ought to 

 be founded on ethics. He has not 

 worked out this idea himself, but 

 it seems not unlikely that the com- 



bination of psychology and ethics, 

 so prominent with thinkers in this 

 country, especially in so original a 

 work as the ' Methods of Ethics ' of 

 Henry Sidgwick, is tending in the 

 direction of a new metaphysic and 

 a philosophy of religion. 



