same stages as those of obligation and responsibility," but the treatment here is of great importance, since it brings with it the statement that ethics "must take the form of a theory of values" (p. 165). If such is seriously the essential form of our science, the recognition and presentation of the fact seems to be surprisingly tardy. Indeed, the reader, during his perusal of the first 165 pages of The Problem of Conduct, seemed justified in his despair of finding the expression of such a view, especially in light of the statement that all sciences are alike normative in character. Moreover, it is not clear how that position can be reconciled with the passing remarks on p. 165 that science "finds in the universe nothing to praise or blame, but only things to understand," and that such an attitude is not that of ethics. Mr. Taylor explains that he refrained from using the terms 'value' and 'worth' in the early part of his treatise in order to guard against the metaphysical implication that might to some minds seem to lurk in the use of the word 'worth,'" and, in particular, against the "dangerous misconconception" that there is any such thing as 'absolute worth' in morality.
Since all 'values' are relative, and belong "only to those things the possession of which affords satisfaction to sentient beings," the standard of worth must be the measure of enjoyment resulting from the gratification of the needs of such beings. The phrase 'absolute worth,' therefore, can mean nothing but permanence and unconditionality of enjoyment, which is equivalent to saying that the worth of certain acts or qualities "depends only upon the conditions involved in the very existence of human society in general" (p. 168). "Thus there is nothing in the proposition that ethics is a theory of values which really militates against our claim that ethics is a purely empirical science. It is for empirical psychology to say what qualities are and what are not of 'absolute' worth for human beings." This conclusion, it may be remarked, is not altogether unequivocal. Of course we must appeal to experience to ascertain what needs men actually do feel, how such needs actually are satisfied, the various values that men do as a matter of fact ascribe to different kinds of satisfaction, and how such judgments of worth vary at different stages of the development of the individual and of the race. But, is it not equally true that empirical psychology is interested in these phenomona simply as existential facts of the psychic life of mankind—facts, the existence of which we have to understand, but which, as psychologists, we can neither "praise nor blame." But if moral values are to be valid at all, we cannot rest content with simply pointing to the fact of the existence of feelings of
