INTRODUCTION. xli 



conditional moral code. They must stoop to consider 

 the actual circumstances of men subject to facts and 

 conditions of nature and environment under which action 

 must be taken, and subject sometimes to perplexities and 

 moral antinomies, where no right course is visible, no 

 moral rule applicable. And if they cannot do this, if 

 the absolute moralist, like Kant, must plead a non possu- 

 mus, then we must be content to improve our evolution 

 and utilitarian ethics, and do the best we can with them. 



Where our scientific authorities are all agreed, as on 

 the question of the ultimate moving principle of action, 

 and again on the question of the freedom of the will, I 

 am in the main agreed with them. But on the last- 

 named famous controversy a new statement of the neces- 

 sitarian theory seems necessary, as well to supply certain 

 points omitted by Mill and Bain, as on the other hand 

 to show the futility of the merely mechanical theories of 

 certain physicists and biologists, who, by reducing all 

 action in man to the play of physical forces in the man- 

 machine, would destroy the moral man altogether, as 

 well as drag this old controversy back once more into the 

 dark regions from which, after infinite vain wrangling, 

 it had just emerged. 



6. There remains an important aspect of Science to 

 be considered ; an aspect in which she is distinguished 

 equally from the metaphysical as from the hypothetical 

 speculations which so often pass current under her name 

 and assume her credit ; an aspect under which she shows 

 herself, her character, and pretensions in their fullest 

 and clearest light. 



There is the Baconian view of Science, according to 

 which she challenges our attention, not upon the strength 



