customs. "These, then, are the three ways in which the competition in man's life and the selection between the competing factors is carried out. And sometimes I think one sees a tendency to suggest that this needs only to be stated, and that the whole question of the application of evolution to ethics is then settled." The most important distinction is, of course, between natural and intelligent or artificial selection. "The whole progress from animal to man and from savage to civilized man shows a gradual supersession of the principle of natural selection by a principle of subjective selection which steadily grows in purposiveness and in intelligence." The conclusion follows that "there is no good ground for taking the lower, the less developed, method of selection as our guide in preference to the higher and more developed. Surely we are not to take natural selection as the sole factor of ethical import because we see it at the crude beginnings of life on this earth, while the process of life itself in its higher ranges passes beyond natural selection."
In the third lecture it is contended that, in spite of the special significance ascribed by Idealism to the moral and religious aspects of life, and in spite of the fact that the recent idealistic movement in England "was really started in the interest of moral ideals as well as of intellectual thoroughness," the result has been a failure, hardly less absolute than in the case of the theory of Evolution, to make any substantial contribution to the solution of the ethical problem. This "bankruptcy of the system in the region of ethics," is no less real in the case of Green than in that of Mr. Bradley; the only difference is that the latter writer has explicitly drawn the negative inferences, so far as ethics is concerned, from his metaphysical theory. Mr. Bradley simply "re-states Green's doctrine with a difference which makes it at once more logical and less ethical." The argument is conducted with the same insight and skill as that in the preceding lecture, and the reader is led on irresistibly to the conclusion that, if ethics is to find a basis for its procedure, it must be elsewhere than in the theories either of naturalistic evolution or of idealism. The cardinal error common to both these systems is the assumption that "moral principles can be reached by the application of scientific generalizations or of the results of a metaphysical analysis which has started by overlooking the facts of the moral consciousness." "There is one thing which all reasoning about morality assumes and must assume; and that is morality itself. The moral concept—whether described as worth or as duty or as goodness—cannot be distilled out of any knowledge about the laws of existence or of occurrence. Nor will speculation
