paper that in ethics, as in
knowledge, thoughts without contents are empty; percepts without
concepts are blind. Description of what has been--empiricism--is futile
in itself to project and criticize. Intuitions and deductions a priori
are empty. The "thoughts" of ethics are of course the terms right, good,
ought, worth, and their kin. The "percepts" are the instincts and
emotions, the desires and aspirations, the conditions of time and place,
of nature, and institutions.

Yet it is misleading to say that in studying the history of morals we
are merely empiricists, and can hope to find no criterion. This would be
the case if we were studying non-moral beings. But moral beings have to
some degree guided life by judgments and not merely followed impulse or
habit. Early judgments as to taboos, customs, and conduct may be crude
and in need of correction; they are none the less judgments. Over and
over we find them reshaped to meet change from hunting to agriculture,
from want to plenty, from war to peace, from small to large groupings.
Much more clearly when we consider civilized peoples, the interaction
between reflection and impulse becomes patent. To study this interaction
can be regarded as futile for the future only if we discredit all past
moral achievement.

Those writers who have based their ethics upon concepts have frequently
expressed the conviction that the security of morality depends upon the
question whether good and right are absolute and eternal essences
independent of human opinion or volition. A different source of
standards which to some offers more promise for the future is the fact
of the moral life _as_ a constant process of forming and reshaping
ideals and of bringing these to bear upon conditions of existence. To
construct a right and good is at least a process tending to
responsibility, if this construction is to be for the real world in
which we must live and not merely for a world of fancy or caprice. It is
not the aim of this paper to give a comprehensive outline of ethical
method. Four factors in the moral life will be pointed out and this
analysis will be used to emphasize especially certain social and
constructive aspects of our concepts of right and good.

I

The four factors which it is proposed to emphasize are these:

(1) Life as a biological process involving relation to nature, with all
that this signifies in the equipment of instincts, emotions, and
selective activity by which