Ethers, MIXED

See MIXED ETHERS. Ethics. Science of morality, which may be variously determined by pleasure, perfection, duty, or divine authority. It is peculiarly distinct from the ordinary sciences, in that its 508 object matter is some ideal end, fact, or condition, which subordinates everything else to it as a means. Though one of the first fields of thought investigated by the awakening human mind, it has as yet failed to obtain definite and generally accepted limits and bases. This probably arises from its subject matter not being something conceived of as actually existing in some ascertainable form, such as physical or mathematical laws, or even psychology and theology; but what should be, what the human will should seek either as its reasonable end or its required duty. With the Greeks, indeed, ethics was invariably a search for the first of these, the sum mum bonum , or ultimate object of reasonable human action, an inquiry, what is man's true well-being, what is the nature of virtue, or of happine ? In more modern speculation it has been rather a study of the principles of duty or of the moral law, the effect on the individual's happine being secondary, though not to be neglected. Moreover, the study of ethics looks upon mankind primarily as individuals, not as societies; it is thus distinguished from politics, though the field of the two must overlap in many places, and they have often been identified. In all treatments of the subject, ancient and modern, these subjects are investigated: 1. The real Well-being or Good of individual men; 2. The nature and means of attaining either Virtue or Pleasure; 3. The principles and detailed requirements of Duty, or the Moral Law: 4. The nature and origin of our Moral Faculties; 5. The Freedom of the Human Will. The subject is more or le closely connected in all systems with Theology, Psychology, Politics and Jurisprudence, and in the most recent discu ions with Biology and general Sociology. As early as the 5th century B.C., in the midst of the speculations on the nature of the outside world characteristic of awakening philosophy, in at least three men. Pythagoras, Her a clit us, and Demo crit us, a large element of ethical thought and teaching appears. The Sophists followed, who in their teaching of how best to get on in the world were led to develop at least the prudential side of morality. But it was the dialectical method and the strong human personality of So crates that brought ethics into the position of central interest which it always afterward maintained in ancient thought. Plato and Aristotle developed his views and extended the rigid investigation of moral science, while the contemporary Cynic and Cyrenaic schools already gave full force to the antithesis between Virtue and Pleasure. This opposition is the most evident and popular mark of distinction between the Stoic school, founded by Zeno, and that of EpiThese two threads continue through the remaining period of ancient philosophy. cur us. After the prevalence of Christianity, the moral code to which it requires obedience was generally accepted. The perception, however, on the part of the schoolmen, that an ethical system might be constructed merely for our natural capacities, gave rise to an inconsistency that is characteristic of med iæval thought. In modern philosophy the great difference of opinion has been between the two views of the origin of our moral ideas. These are known, roughly speaking, as Intuitionism or Common Sense, the belief that there is a nece ary moral code which is imposed upon us by God, and that we are given faculties which enable us to recognize its requirements; and Utilitarianism, which teaches that enlightened Self-interest and Social Utility are the only sources and proper criteria of moral judgments. With the former view, generally speaking, are connected the names of Clarke. Butler. Reid, Kant, and Whewell; with the latter, Nobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, Paley, Helvetius, Comte, Hegel, James and John Stuart Mill. The conception of evolution has profoundly modified ethics, as it has every other department of human thought, and the current ethical controversies therefore include an element introduced by biological and general sociological science. Herbert Spencer and Leslie Stephen especially represent this application of the inductions of physical science to the problems of ethics.