510 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



creed, the more necessary it seems to be to establish 

 firmly and definitely the principles and postulates of 

 morality — i.e., a moral creed. A great part of modern 

 speculation abroad is, at the end of the century, occupied 

 with this latter, the practical, problem, and has thus 

 arrived at a better understanding of what philosophical 

 thought has been occupied with in this country during 



49. the whole of the nineteenth century. For it has 



Ethical 



spirit of always been characteristic of British philosophy that it 

 philosophy, j^g^g g^yen independent and special attention to the 

 ethical problem. This problem was of equal interest to 

 those who took the metaphysical problem, the prob- 

 lem of Keality, to be satisfactorily solved in the ruling 

 religious creed — as was the case throughout the Scottish 

 school of common-sense — and to those who, following 

 Hume, despaired of satisfactorily solving either the 

 problem of Knowledge or the problem of Eeality. 

 Generally speaking German philosophy has arrived, 

 towards the end of the nineteenth century, at a douljt 

 regarding the capacity of the human intellect to solve 

 these problems, similar to that expressed, more than a 

 hundred years earlier, by David Hume. 



50. English philosophers, in approaching the ethical prob- 

 British Icms, havc after all not been so very far away from the 



thinkers to , • i i i • • i ' i 



iieta- metaphysical problem as is sometimes supposed and rep- 



resented ; for in attempting to define the highest ends 

 and aims of human conduct, they have implicitly ap- 

 proached the question : What is or should be the highest 

 reality for us human beings ? In the end also, notably 

 in the later writings of J. S. Mill, when the metaphysical 

 support which current religious beliefs afforded was 



