It is, then, on the basic principle of the moral that the attention of thought has to be fixed. The mere giving of a list of virtues and duties is like striking notes at random on the piano and thinking it is music. And when we come to discuss the works of earlier moralists, it is only the elements in them which can help the establishment of an ethical system that will interest us, not the way in which any system has been advocated. Otherwise there is no success for any attempt to bring order into chaos. How utterly at sea Friedrich Jodl_(_2_)_ is in his history of ethics, the most important existing work in this department, when he tries to estimate the relative values of the various ethical standpoints! Failing to judge them directly by their distance from an initial basic principle of morality, he is unable to establish a standard of comparison. He gives us, therefore, only a survey of ethical views, and no history of the ethical problem. Religious and philosophical ethics When we come to look for the fundamental principle of morality, are we concerned only with the direct attempts of philosophy to find it? No, we are concerned with every kind, those of religion as well as others. We must trace out the whole experience of mankind in its search for the ethical. The raising of a dividing wall between philosophical ethics and religious ethics is based on the mistaken idea that the former are scientific and the latter non-scientific. But neither of them is either: they are both alike merely thought; only one has freed itself from acceptance of the traditional religious world-view, while the other still maintains its connexion with it. [pg 025] The difference, however, is merely relative. Religious ethics appeal, indeed, to a supernatural authority, but that is rather the form which they assume. As a matter of fact, however high they rise, they still seek to find an independent basic principle of morality. In every religious genius there lives an ethical thinker, and every really deep philosophical moralist is in some way or other religious. How indeterminate is the border-line is shown by Indian ethics. Are they religious, or are they philosophical? Originating in the thought of the priests, they claim to be a deeper exposition of the demands of religion, but in essential nature they are philosophical. With the Buddha and others, they venture to make the step from pantheism to atheism, but without giving up their claim to be religious. Spinoza and Kant, however, who are counted among philosophical moralists, do, if we judge by the general direction of their thought, belong at the same time to the religious ones.