Forcibly suggestive is this picture of moral philosophy and philosophers. From the remotest ages certain men have arrogated to themselves a knowledge in the realm of ethics much superior to their brethren. It was manifested by the “gnomic” poetry of Greece, more than 700 years B. C., and in the oracular sayings of the so-called “seven sages” of antiquity. To this day a similar class of wiseacres may be found in all parts of the earth. The moralists, however, search not for the universal medicine or an irresistible solvent. Such persons admit the “grand elixir” is a delusion; and yet, their ambition is more daring and presumptious. They would “be as gods, knowing good and evil.” “Gold is but dross,” they exclaim, “our quest is for _necessary_ moral truth. We seek _immutable_ righteousness.” Long ago was Alchemy abandoned as futile. Not so the egotistic dogmatism of the moral philosophers: with them self-conceit has remained incorrigible, from Socrates and Plato, through Kant and Hegel, to Martineau and Janet. In vain, their assumptions have been repeatedly demolished and their deductions refuted. Unmindful are they, also, of the irreconcilable conflict of “schools”--the hopeless contradiction of “systems.” Fully one hundred great thinkers, first and last, have asserted the discovery of indubitable “good.” But no two of them all agreed upon the infallible line of distinction between what “ought to be” and its opposite. In fact, every individual of the number represents a different scheme. All moral philosophers asseverate the necessity for an authoritative standard of right and wrong--for some peremptory and incontestable guide to human conduct. Otherwise, they admit, one opinion is no more acceptable or commanding than another. Some affirm the existence of an innate faculty, the unerring dictates of which are defended. But Bentham (a great jurist) denounced the “moral sense” man as a bully who would brow-beat others into accepting his verdict. All such appeals were described by him as sheer “_ipse dixitism_: as a fraud by which incompetent philosophers would palm their own tastes and fancies upon mankind.” “One man,” wrote Bentham of Shaftesbury, “says _he_ has a thing made on purpose to tell _him_ what is right and what is wrong; and that it is called _moral sense_: then he goes to work at his ease and says such and such a thing is right, and such and such a thing is wrong. Why? ‘Because _my_ moral sense tells me it is.’” Of the inner-capacity-philosopher, Hazlitt remarked that “his excessive egotism filled all objects with himself.” To Crabbe, “he was a self-conceited man, who pretends to see through intuition what others learn by experience and observation; to know in a day what another wants years to acquire; to learn of himself what others are contented to get by means of instruction.”