direct [?] and personal behavior invite a more abstract and systematic [italics mine] impersonal treatment than that which they receive in the exigencies of their occurrence"; but where in the theoretical part of this work is this systematization or unification of conflicting stand-points effected? And is its suggestive and ingenious and interesting treatment of the "fruitfulness" and the "surveying power" of theories an adequate equivalent for that exposition of a relatively coherent body of truth which the student naturally looks for in a text-book setting forth the elements and the main conceptions and principles of a science? It may—strangely enough no doubt—such has been the treatment of ethical science for some thirty or forty years—be almost an unfair thing to accuse philosophers of reputation of an apparent inability to furnish in a treatment of the facts of conduct and the moral judgment, either a sharp or demonstratively operative criterion of the distinction between right and wrong or an explanation of the fact (or the illusion) that man seems to set up for himself and others a norm or rule of conduct in which he believes, in as persistent a manner as do aesthetically minded people in their judgment of the beautiful and the ugly. Yet this is only too true of the book before us, a thing that makes it, so far as the objectivity of the moral judgment is concerned, no better and no worse than the many books upon conduct and its principles that have appeared since the time of Green and Spencer.
Look how elusive and how dialectical is the following treatment of the question of a criterion or standard or central point of view in morals without the attempt at a basal treatment of all alleged fundamental concepts that we are inclined to look for in philosophy. It is (1) the "moral situation" that is first suggestively but externally [it arises, we are told, when "ends" conflict, but what is "end"?] described. On p. 263 the result is reached that (2) the "appropriate subject-matter of moral judgment [not just the same topic as the "moral situation"] is disposition" in view of the "consequences" it tends to produce. On p, 364 "moral situation" and moral judgment have become (3) "moral worth"; disposition as manifest in endeavors is the seat of moral worth. And on p. 393 it is (4) the tendency of the moral act to "sustain a whole complex system of social values" that has become the problem of morality, just as this again is explicitly said a few pages further on to be (5) the "formation" of a voluntary self out of "original instinctive impulses,"—the really recurring theme of the book, a "genetic," but not an ultimately explanatory point of view, so far as the moral judgment of right and wrong
