"What makes all right acts right, and all wrong acts wrong?" (p. 19), it is answered that the good is the source of the right, "that" the right is the claim of the good upon the agent." As related problems, intuitionalism and ethical empiricism are explained, as is also the significance of hedonism and rationalism in their various historical forms.
The chapter on 'The Method of Ethics' is the only one which shows any important change of view, and this affords pleasing evidence that the author never regards the circle of his thought as closed, but is an earnest critic of his own work. In the present edition, instead of maintaining that the method of ethics is that of philosophy rather than that of science, he expounds, at length, the scientific status of the study. This frank acceptance of the scientific method is not, however, a rejection of a metaphysic of ethics as legitimate and necessary. It is rather a sharper differentiation between a science and a philosophy of ethics for which Professor Seth is contending. He still insists as strongly as ever that metaphysics as a "critic of the sciences" (p. 31), determining the 'final validity' of all our judgments, is essential to a complete answer to the moral problem. (See also Part III, which deals exclusively with the metaphysical question involved.) But if ethics is to regarded as a science, we must, he urges, "distinguish carefully between two types or groups of sciences" (p. 25). The one "seeks to organize into a rational system the chaotic mass of our is-judgments," while the other deals with " the no less chaotic mass of our Ought-judgments." There will be then " both a natural and a normative science of ethics" (p. 27). The former is the necessary "propædeutic to the latter," offering a "genetic study of the moral life," and seeking to "discover the causation of morality, the uniformities and sequences which characterize moral antecedents and consequents, as they characterize all other phenomena." Such a natural science is the 'hand-maid' of ethics as a normative science, supplying its 'data,' while the further task of the normative phase of the science will be to determine the meaning and rationale of the facts. The method of science, in general, is defined as the "systematization of our ordinary judgments" (p. 35), and it is insisted that even a normative science of ethics can not "transcend the sphere of common sense." Its criticism is "immanent, never transcendent."
To 'The Psychological Basis' are added several pages of interesting discussion of the problem of 'psychological hedonism.' The outcome may, perhaps, be fairly represented by the statement that Butler's word 'interest' is accepted as the most satisfactory term for the dynamic principle of conduct, since it expresses "that concrete unity of the ideal content and the impulsive force which makes possible its realization in the act of choice" (p. 74).
The treatment of 'The Moral Ideal' which constitutes Part I, although subjected to a careful revision, remains substantially the same. A change of terminology is to be noted in Chapter II. For 'Rigorism' of the earlier editions 'Rationalism' is substituted—a change which seems desirable be
