The Project Gutenberg eBook, Recent Tendencies in Ethics, by William
Ritchie Sorley

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Title: Recent Tendencies in Ethics

Author: William Ritchie Sorley

Release Date: June 2, 2004 [eBook #12492]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECENT TENDENCIES IN ETHICS***

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RECENT TENDENCIES IN ETHICS

Three Lectures to Clergy Given at Cambridge

BY

W. R. SORLEY, M.A. HON. LL.D. EDIN.

Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy

MCMIV

PREFACE

These lectures were given to a summer meeting of clergy, held at
Cambridge in the month of July last. Some passages have been added as
they were written out for the press, and the crudities of the spoken
word have, I hope, been pruned away; but, in other respects, the
original plan of the lectures has been retained. They are now
published in the hope that they may prove of interest to those who
heard them, and to others who may desire an account, in short compass
and in popular form, of some leading features of the ethical thought
of the present day.

It is inevitable for such an account to be controversial: otherwise it
could not give a true picture of contemporary opinion. Intellectual
and social causes have conspired to accentuate traditional differences
in ethics, and to make the questions in dispute penetrate to the very
heart of morality. It has been my aim to trace the new influences
which are at work, and to estimate the value of the ethical doctrines
to which they have seemed to lead. The estimate has taken the form of
a criticism, but the criticism is in the interests of construction.

W.R. SORLEY.

CAMBRIDGE, 7th March, 1904.

CONTENTS.

I. CHARACTERISTICS
II. ETHICS AND EVOLUTION
III. ETHICS AND IDEALISM

INDEX

I.

CHARACTERISTICS.

A survey of ethical thought, especially English ethical thought,
during the last century would have to lay stress upon one
characteristic feature. It was limited in range,--limited, one may
say, by its regard for the importance of the