THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF DETERMINISM.
A SERIOUS defect in much of our modern ethical writing is the failure to recognize the necessity of working on strictly scientific lines when endeavoring to develop a sound theory of moral philosophy. At present we mix up ethics as a science with ethics as an art ; we try to combine in our text-books on morals the methods of the pulpit with those of the class-room, and we cannot discuss the theory of ethics with absolute freedom, because we are constantly hampered by the fear lest our conclusions should prove hurtful, in their application, to human interests; hence we work at a disadvantage, and ethics at the present day lags far behind, not only the physical sciences, but the sister science of psychology. In no respect is this weakness more noticeable than in the vague and unsatisfactory treatment of determinism by many even of our most brilliant writers, who, while they would never think of denying the necessity of reasoning from effects to causes in any other sphere of knowledge, yet hesitate to admit that natural antecedent conditions alone are to be sought for in explanation of moral actions.
Yet, if ethics is in the future to be studied by scientific methods, we shall be forced to admit the validity of the law of causation in the domain of moral phenomena as unreservedly as we now accept it in that of physical phenomena. Or, rather, we shall have to break down that wall of separation which still in our thought is allowed to isolate the activities of man from those of the rest of nature; recognizing frankly that to understand such human activities means that we know from what they spring, and in what they result, and that we can begin to study any fact of moral significance only on the supposition that it has had a cause, the discovery of which will form its explanation. It is just this view which, when held without any reservation, constitutes determinism as opposed to what is called libertarianism, which asserts that man's actions
