A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF THE LITERATURE OF 

 ETHICAL SCIENCE SINCE THE TIME OF 

 CHARLES DARWIN.* 



Walter L. Sheldon. 



In presenting this paper I am assuming that it is being 

 offered to a body of men for the most part absorbed in a 

 study of the physical sciences. Owing to the necessity now- 

 adays for specializing, and to the effort required to keep up 

 even with the literature in your own departments, it may be 

 that some of you are not fully aware of what has been going 

 on along those lines where the work is of a more subjective 

 character. It struck me therefore that I might be doing a 

 real service by giving you a hint as to the trend of the litera- 

 ture in the science of ethics for the last three or four decades, 

 since the time of Darwin. It would be a satisfaction on my 

 part to convince you that in this other direction good work 

 has been going on, of as painstaking and thorough a character 

 as anything which may have been done in physics, chemistry 

 or biology. My purpose is not myself to criticise or theo- 

 rize, but merely to sketch for you a bird's-eye view of the 

 situation. Men of as great intellectual caliber as any of 

 those at work in your special departments, have been grap- 

 pling with the problems of ethical science ; and they have 

 achieved encouraging results, while these results may not be 

 as great as some would have anticipated. 



Although ethics has a large subjective element in it, most 

 of the leading workers in this direction would regard it strictly 

 as a science, and deal with it in that light. These men are 

 undertaking to investigate a body of facts, to analyze them, 

 to correlate them, to interpret them, and reduce them if 

 possible to a system. Some of them would, however, regard 



♦ Presented to The Academy of Science of St. Louis, January 19, 1903. 



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