Considering man as merely a natural object, or as a mere animal, there is only one quality that nature demands of him. This is efficiency. Nature's sole law is here "Be Strong." How that strength and efficiency is secured and maintained is of no consequence whatever. The heat he requires, the food he needs may be stolen from others, but it will serve. The food will not nourish the less, the fire will not warm the less. So long as efficiency is acquired it is a matter of absolute indifference how it is secured. Considered as a mere animal object it is difficult to see that morality has any meaning at all for man. It is when we come to regard him in his relation to others that we begin to see the meaning and significance of morality emerge. Now one of the first things that strike us in connection with moral laws or rules is that they are all statements of relation. Such moral commands as "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not kill," the commands to be truthful, kind, dutiful, etc., all imply a relation to others. Apart from this relation moral rules have simply no meaning whatever. By himself a man could neither steal, nor lie, nor do any of the things that we habitually characterize as immoral. A man living by himself on some island would be absolved from all moral law; it would have no meaning whatever for him. He would be neither moral nor immoral, he would simply be without the conditions that make morality possible. But once bring him into relations with his kind and his behaviour begins to have a new and peculiar significance, not alone to these others, but also to himself. What he does affects them, and also affects himself so far as they determine the character of his relations to these others. He must, for example, either work with them or apart from them. He must either be on his guard against their securing their own efficiency at his expense, or rest content that a mutual forbearance and trust will govern their association. To ignore them is an impossibility. He must reckon with these others in a thousand and one different ways, and this reckoning will have its effect on the moulding of his nature and upon theirs. Morality, then, whatever else it may be, is primarily the expression of a relation. And the laws of morality are, consequently, a summary or description of those relations. From this point of view they stand upon exactly the same level as any of the arts or sciences. Moral actions are the subject matter of observation, and the determination of their essential quality or character is by the same methods as we determine the essential quality of the "facts" in chemistry or biology. The task before the scientific enquirer is, therefore, to determine the conditions which give to moral rules or "laws" their meaning and validity.