It must be admitted that, with rare exceptions, our estimates of others are apt to be low rather than lofty. Can we ascribe worth to those whom we hold cheap? The reason of our habitual under-estimation of fellowmen I think is that we regard them from the standpoint of the use to which we can put them, and do not see them from the inside, as it were, in the light of the marvelous energies of which human nature is the scene. The grossest matter, the most ordinary physical happenings, reveal to the instructed eye of the scientist the play of forces which it taxes the most powerful intellects in some measure to apprehend and describe. Yet these miracles escape the dull senses of those of us who deal with the forces of nature from the point of view of their immediate use. We turn on the electric light, but have little more than a crude surmise of the things that the word electricity meant to Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, or Hertz. And as we turn on the electric light, so we turn on our fellowmen, as it were, to use them. The thought of the poet—“What a piece of work is man, how infinite in faculty!” occurs to us only at scattered moments. And yet things transpire in the inner life of human beings far more marvelous than the chemical processes or the flux of electric waves, did we but attend to them. There is in particular one kind of energy to which the quality of worth may well attach itself. It is unlike the physical forces; it is not a transformed mode of mechanical energy. It is _sui generis_, underivative, unique; it is synonymous with highest freedom; it is power raised to the Nth degree. It is ethical energy. To release it in oneself is to achieve unbounded expansion. Morality, as commonly understood, is a system of rules, chiefly repressive. Ethical energy, on the contrary, is determined by the very opposite tendency; a tendency, it is true, never more than tentatively effectuated under finite conditions. And because the energy is unique, it points toward a unique, irreducible, hence substantive entity in man, from which it springs. This entity is itself incognizable, yet the effect it produces requires that it be postulated. The category of substance, which is almost disappearing from science, is to be reinstalled in ethics. Ethics cannot dispense with it. This, as a prelude, may suffice to indicate the path along which we shall proceed. _The Reason Why the Method of Ethics Must Be the Opposite of the Method Employed by the Physical Sciences_