correct test of morality; it is another thing altogether to say that our ordinary moral rules are the records or expressions of earlier judgments of utility.  The former statement is made as a controversial statement which is admitted to be so far doubtful that most men need to be convinced of it.  The latter statement could only be true if nobody had ever doubted the former—­if everybody in past ages had accepted utility as the standard of morality.  But, for our present purpose, his attitude to this question is of interest only as bringing out the point that the different schools of ethical thought during last century had a large basis of common agreement, and that this basis of common agreement was their acknowledgment of the validity of the moral rules recognised by the ordinary conscience.

[Footnote 1:  Utilitarianism, p. 34.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., p. 33.]

The Utilitarians no more than the Intuitionists sought to make any fundamental change in the content of right and of wrong as acknowledged by modern society.  Their controversies were almost entirely of what may be called an academic kind, and, however decided, would have little effect upon a man’s practical attitude.  But it would not be possible to make any such confident assertion regarding the ethical controversies of the present day.  We have no longer the same common basis of agreement to rely upon that our predecessors had a generation ago.  There are many indications in recent literature that the suggestion is now made more readily than it was twenty or thirty years ago that the scale of moral values may have to be revised; and it seems to me that the ethical controversies of the coming generation will not be restricted to academic opponents whose disputes concern nothing more than the origin of moral ideas and their ultimate criterion.  Modern controversy will involve these questions, but it will go deeper and it will spread its results wider:  it appears as if it would not hesitate to call in question the received code of morality, and to revise our standard of right and wrong.  One school at any rate has already made a claim of this sort, and the extravagance of its teaching has not prevented it from attracting adherents.

It is on this ground, therefore,—­because I believe that the ethical question is no longer so purely an academic question as it was some years ago, because it affects not only the philosophic thinker but the practical man who is concerned with the problems of his day,—­that I have selected the topic for these lectures.  It is not merely that many modern writers assert some general doctrine as to the relativity of right and wrong.  So much was implied, though it was not much laid stress upon, in the utilitarian doctrine.  For the utilitarian conduct is right according to the amount of happiness it produces:  goodness is relative to its tendency to produce happiness.  But a much greater importance may attach to the assertion of the relativity of morals when one couples that doctrine with the idea now prevalent of the indefinitely great changes which the progress of the race brings about, not only in the social order but also in the structure and faculties of man himself.