Now the ethical controversies of last century were almost entirely about these two points and between these two opposed schools.  No doubt the two questions thus discussed did go very near to the root of the whole matter.  They pointed to the consideration of the question of man’s place in the universe and his spiritual nature as determining the part which it was his to play in the world.  They suggested, if they did not always raise, the question whether man is entirely a product of nature or whether he has a spiritual essence to which nature may be subdued.  But the larger issues suggested were not followed out.  Common consent seemed to limit the discussion to the two questions described; and this limitation of the controversy tended to a precision and clearness in method, which is often wanting in the ethical thought of the present day, disturbed as it is by new and more far-reaching problems.

This limitation of scope, which I venture to select as the leading characteristic of last century’s ethical enquiries, may be further seen in the large amount of agreement between the two schools regarding the content of morality.  The Utilitarians no more than the Intuitionists were opponents of the traditional—­as we may call it—­the Christian morality of modern civilisation.  They both adopted and defended the well-recognised virtues of truth and justice, of temperance and benevolence, which have been accepted by the common tradition of ages as the expression of man’s moral consciousness.  The Intuitionists no doubt were sometimes regarded—­they may indeed have sometimes regarded themselves—­as in a peculiar way the guardians of the traditional morality, and as interested more than their opponents in defending a view in harmony with man’s spiritual essence and inheritance.  But we do not find any attack upon the main content of morality by the Utilitarian writers.  On the contrary, they were interested in vindicating their own full acceptance of the traditional morality.  This is, in particular, the case with John Stuart Mill, the high-minded representative of the Utilitarian philosophy in the middle of last century.  “In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth,” he says, “we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility.  To do as one would be done by, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Utilitarianism, 9th ed., pp. 24, 25.]

No doubt Mill was a practical reformer as well as a philosophical thinker, and he wished on certain special points to revise the accepted code.  He says that “the received code of ethics is by no means of divine right, that mankind has still much to learn as to the effects of actions on the general happiness."[1] He would even take this point—­the modifiability of the ordinary moral code—­as a sort of test question distinguishing his own system from that of the intuitional moralists; and in one place he says that “the contest between the