hat 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 n