ought, if our argument is sound, to come to the same conclusion. And one line of argument will not interfere with the other. If the present paper is restricted to the former line of argument, it is mainly because systems of metaphysical ethics have been frequently and fully elaborated, whereas ethical metaphysics still remains at the stage of suggestion, and its method of treatment is complicated by many preliminary questions which could not be discussed in a few pages.
The characteristic of the former method is to begin with metaphysical conceptions and from them to pass to ethical conceptions. Metaphysics is in this way made the basis of ethics, so that the latter in some way depends upon the former. This dependence is sometimes regarded as simply the application of principles ascertained by reflexion upon reality to a new subject-matter. It is a dependence of this sort that Professor Taylor has in view in his examination of metaphysical ethics. Ethics, in this view, is held to be "an application of metaphysics to the subject-matter of conduct."[1] This kind of dependence is illustrated in the relation of mechanics to mathematics: mathematical principles are applied to a new subject-matter, the movements of masses. Metaphysical moralists may have often expressed themselves in a way which seems to imply a similar view concerning the relation of ethics to metaphysics. But it is not so easy to point to any system in which it is consistently and deliberately followed out. Professor Taylor regards 'metaphysical ethics' as practically equivalent to the Kantian view.[2] The equivalence would hold if Kant had simply applied his categories and ideas of reason to the subject-matter of conduct. But he did not do so. He recognized the categorical imperative as a fact of consciousness, though not, in his terminology, a fact of experience; and his whole ethics becomes an interpretation of the moral consciousness. This is not mere conduct, but a conception directing and judging conduct. It may, of course, be called metaphysical, but it does not arise out of his speculative analysis of reality. And its significance extends to the problems left unsolved by the speculative analysis, so that Kant's metaphysic of ethics has become the foundation of all
