itself a fundamental concept, not some thing that changes. From Heraclitus and Aristotle to Bergson and James has been a long and difficult road, but at last it is being conceded that whatever reality there is, is itself in an endless process of perfecting itself.

This conception has hardly as yet taken possession of religious thought. People are inclined still to worship the old Jehovah-God or some "absentee" deity who exists apart from the changing order. It may be a long time before mankind generally accepts the profounder religion of the worship of a set of values that belong to life, whose ideals operate as an inner necessity working as a transforming and saving energy. Such a religion, revealed of old in many countries through the sentiments, and enjoyed now by more advanced minds as both normatively and descriptively true, makes no distinction between divine and human things. Common life is redeemed and sanctified here and now because permeated by the spirit. of eternal beauty and worth and truth, of which we all are the incarnation.

A third feature of modern philosophy has reference to the nature of knowledge. It has passed through the stage of extreme headishness during which it would trust to nothing for its guidance but its rare intellect. It is now learning to be more heartful and to trust its feelings along with its intellect. There are, among others, two facts that have led modern philosophy irresistibly in this direction. The first is the insufficiency of rational psychology to account for the deeper life of music, art, poetry, morality, and religion. These have a "wisdom" that is life-giving and entirely satisfying but which cannot be described in terms of sets of ideas. The intellect is entirely helpless to penetrate their depth. Still the heart clings to them in confidence. The failure of the intellect to explain, much less to describe, this sort of truth has unsettled the foundations of rational psychology and set the mind upon further quest.

The needed light is coming from a tempered Intuitionalism. The developmental view of life had already turned our thought in this direction. If the life of plants and of lower and higher

animals belongs to a single order, if Nature makes no leaps but each "new" thing is but the variation upon and refinement of some old fact or function, then there is no difference in kind between the "native reactions" of simpler organisms and the conscious behavior of men, between the instinctive adjustments of animals and the logical judgments of a scientist. Genetic logic is approximating a satisfactory description of the relationship between these apparent extremes. It is not uncommon for the students of the mental life to speak of the "intellectual instinct." Genetic psychology is making many inroads into discovering the kinship between the instinctive wisdom of the lower kinds and the refined intuitions of cultivated minds. We are discovering rapidly enough why mankind has a right to trust the wisdom of the heart, since it apprehends in this manner the deeper things of art, morality, and religion, even when the intellect cannot describe the reason for its sense of fulfillment. It may be, indeed, that philosophy owes as much to poetry and religion as it does to logic, in spite of the fact that its passion for clearness of outline has tempted it to suppose itself allied chiefly with science.

Time will permit the mention of only one other fundamental philosophical tendency, that which has reference to its conception of the nature of reality. The present drift is but to deepen the old conviction that some form of Idealism is the true view of life. The culmination of Greek thought was in the idealism of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The development of the past four centuries through Descartes and Berkeley, Hume and Kant, has been so decidedly in the direction of idealism that at the present time it is difficult to find a student who has been schooled in both science and philosophy who is an exponent of materialism. The whole influence of empirical psychology since Locke has been progressively to weaken one's faith in things as objects. The fundamental fact that remains always unshakable is that of experience.

In this connection I shall have time to mention but one facta most novel one-namely, that the physical sciences. have themselves proven recently our surest deliverers from the finality of a world of matter in which consciousness is but a

passing phenomena. The one stubborn datum that has staggered idealism always is the presence of the objects of the physical world, and latterly the existence of an uncreated stellar universe with its nebulæ, and its probable worlds with their growth stages. But it is rarely now that we find a physicist or chemist who believes longer in the so-called "common-sense" interpretation of matter. That has become to him, as a scientist, the height of foolishness. He is leaning now to the electron or ion theory of its organization, no longer the atomic and molecular conception, but infinitely smaller atoms than those to which we used to pin our faith, so much smaller that the old-fashioned molecule is a little universe in itself. The problem now hinges here are these infinitely minute atoms bearers of energy, or are they in and for themselves but positive and negative points of stress and strain in space? Many scientists take the latter alternative, and are inclined to make matter but a form of energy. "Why may we not affirm now," said a physicist friend of mine, "that the energy that shows itself as matter is at bottom one with that which manifests itself as life?" Since, now, the common-sense of science is the foolishness of the energism of Ostwald and other scientists, the door is thrown wide open to reaffirm with new meaning the old truth of Aristotle that this same energy is one with spirit.

So our present outlook would seem to be along these four lines empiricism, that we are to work out our salvation and not sit about and talk in abstract terms about the beauty of reality; evolutionism, that life itself in all its manifestations is a part of the vast order of development, so that whatever life there is in the universe is akin; intuitionalism, that the deeps of consciousness, the deep things of the heart, are to be trusted as well as those that appeal to the intellect; idealism, that we ourselves are a part of the abiding order of things which at bottom is spiritual.

MR. FROTHINGHAM. - When I first met the next speaker, he was a student in Cambridge; he is now a professor in Dartmouth College. I think you have had the pleasure of hearing him more than once in the past at these Festivals. It gives me great satisfaction to present Professor George Clarke Cox, of Dartmouth College.

THE FORWARD LOOK IN ETHICS

PROFESSOR GEORGE CLARKE COX

Ladies and Gentlemen:

Your Chairman professes to be free-born. I belong to the other crowd. I had to obtain my liberty with a great price. And I was irresistibly reminded, as he was making that claim here in Boston, of the Irish-American from Boston who at forty years of age made his first visit to Ireland. He was overjoyed with what he found, and wrote back to his friends, saying, "To think that I was forty years old before I set foot in my native land!" I may not have been free-born, but I

knew where to come.

The speaker before me has referred to progress in philosophy; and I notice that ethics is spoken of as if it were something separate. I do not know whether the Programme to-day is to blame for that; but ethics is not separate from philosophy, and cannot possibly be separated from it. Whatever be your ethics at this present moment, it depends upon your philosophy. Most of you have, I presume, what is known as Christian ethics; and that depends entirely upon your conception of the universe as either created or sustained by a divine being whose will is final. If you want to be good, you will observe that will. If you want to be bad, you will observe the contrary. Now, that is a philosophy, of a kind, but it is not very advanced in form. If you are an idealist, and maintain that mind is fundamental in the universe, you will have

certain conceptions of ethics; if you are a materialist, you will have certain other conceptions of ethics.

I am not quite sure, but I think I must disagree with my friend, Professor Starbuck, and say that it does not seem to me of the slightest importance whether the universe is fundamentally mind, or fundamentally matter, or fundamentally x. The universe is exactly what it is, and colors would be the same, whether we are idealist or materialist. Sugar would be sweet under either condition; love would be love; honor would be honor, and truth would be truth. But it is the business of ethics to seek out these things, to try to say what good conduct is, what right conduct is, and its problem may easily be divided into two.

One is to discover, if possible, the ground of moral obligation. What is the real ground of moral obligation? Here we have abundant opportunity for difference of schools. We have your Hedonist, the man who believes in pleasure; and the Stoic, with his appeal to virtue; and Plato, with his ideal of a great State, a social ideal. We have Aristotle, with that golden mean that Mr. Frothingham would like; and we have the modern school, those especially who are intuitionists, who believe that we can get at what is right through the conscience the common Christian belief. This is the belief of most people. The other school sums the whole thing up in Kant's great rule that you must only do that which you would be willing to have become the universal rule for all mankind. Or you may take that which has been so much scorned, utilitarianism, and say that a thing is good if it has been proved useful. You can carry it out to that somewhat illogical but very interesting development of John Stuart Mill's, where he makes a distinction between the utility of being a Socrates or a pig, and says it is much better to be a Socrates unhappy than a pig happy. You may do any of those things you please, or you may talk about the self-development school. I take it I am not here to-day to give you a lecture on those subjects.

The second division of ethics considers how, having found out what your standard of ethical behavior is, you are going to get anybody to follow it. This Free Religious Association