252 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



activity; the latter refers to an impelling or prompt- 

 ing force through which good actions are produced 

 and regulated, the source out of which they flow : this 

 is usually termed the feeling of duty or the moral 

 conscience. Coherent systems of ethics can be con- 

 structed from either of the two beginnings ; both have 

 special difficulties to solve. The philosopher who starts 

 with the contemplation of the end or ends to be 

 realised by human action, must define these ends, 

 and must further explain how it comes that they 

 recommend themselves to the individual human will 

 and become obligatory : the dicta of conscience. On 

 the other side, the systematic thinker who starts 

 with the facts of duty and conscience will have to 

 explain not only what dutiful conduct consists in and 

 what it leads us to, but he will also be confronted 

 with the difficult task of assigning to the fundamental 

 fact of moral conscience its meaning and origin, espe- 

 cially as it seems confined to the narrow region of 

 human consciousness, which forms, after all, but a 

 small, an almost infinitesimal part of the great visible 

 world, the Cosmos. 



The two positions thus clearly indicated by Paulsen 

 have found representatives in modern German thought. 

 Paulsen himself declares unmistakably for the former. 

 According to him, Ethics is Guterlehre. He also explains 

 that in the history of philosophy this is the older of 

 the two, having found its first systematic exposition in 

 the ' Nicomachean Ethics ' of Aristotle. Paulsen also 

 explains how what was originally the theory of the Good 

 or of Goods, as the ends to be secured by moral conduct, 



