l 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 morality which appeals to an external standard, and
that which grounds itself on internal conviction, is the contest
of progressive morality against stationary--of reason and argument
against the deification of mere opinion and habit. The doctrine that
the existing order of things is the natural order, and that, being
natural, all innovation upon it is criminal, is as vicious in morals
as it is now at last admitted to be in physics and in society and
government."[2]

[Footnote 1: Ibid., p. 35.]

[Footnote 2: Dissertations, ii. 472.]

A passage such as this leads us to ask, What exactly is the extent of
the modifications which Mill seeks to make in the ordinary scale of
values? Does he, for instance, wish to invert any ordinary moral
rules? Would he do away with, or in any important respect modify, the
duties of truth or justice, temperance or benevolence? Far from it He
only suggests, as many moralists of both parties have suggested, that
in the application of moral law to the details of experience certain
modifications are required. How far he goes in this direction may be
seen from his own instance, that of truth. He would admit certain
exceptions to the law of truth; he would give the less rigorous
answers to the time-honoured questions as to whether one should tell
the truth to an invalid in a dangerous illness or to a would-be
criminal. But Mill always asserts the sanctity of the general
principle; and,