Many writers on ethics have simply tried to turn this collection of working rules into a science, somewhat as Dr. Whewell has done.  This is the peculiar weakness of those who have been called the “intuitionalists”—­though I must warn the reader against assuming that this term has but the one meaning, and that all those to whom it has been applied should be placed in the same class.  Here it is used to indicate those who maintain that we are directly aware of the validity of certain moral principles, must accept them as ultimate, and need only concern ourselves with the problem of their application.

72.  ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHY.—­When John Locke maintained that there are no “innate practical principles,” or innate moral maxims, he pointed in evidence to the “enormities practiced without remorse” in different ages and by different peoples.  The list he draws up is a curious and an interesting one.[4]

In our day it has pretty generally come to be recognized by thoughtful men that a man’s judgments as to right and wrong reflect the phase of civilization, or the lack of it, which he represents, and that their significance cannot be understood when we consider them apart from their historic setting.  This means that no man’s conscience is set up as an ultimate standard, but that every man’s conscience is regarded as furnishing material which the science of ethics must take into account.

May we, broadening the basis upon which we are to build, and studying the manners, customs, and moral judgments of all sorts and conditions of men, develop an empirical science of ethics which will be independent of philosophy?

It does not seem that we can do this.  We are concerned with psychological phenomena, and their nature and significance are by no means beyond dispute.  For example, there is the feeling of moral obligation, of which ethics has so much to say.  What is this feeling, and what is its authority?  Is it a thing to be explained?  Can it impel a man, let us say, a bigot, to do wrong?  And what can we mean by credit and discredit, by responsibility and free choice, and other concepts of the sort?  All this must remain very vague to one who has not submitted his ethical concepts to reflective analysis of the sort that we have a right to call philosophical.

Furthermore, it does not seem possible to decide what a man should or should not do, without taking into consideration the circumstances in which he is placed.  The same act may be regarded as benevolent or the reverse according to its context.  If we will but grant the validity of the premises from which the medieval churchman reasoned, we may well ask whether, in laying hands violently upon those who dared to form independent judgments in matters of religion, he was not conscientiously doing his best for his fellow-man.  He tried by all means to save some, and to what he regarded as a most dangerous malady he applied a drastic remedy.  By what standard shall we judge him?