The science of ethics is faced with a double task owing to the nature of man’s evolution and history. Human societies have been built upon a basis which is not that of justice and right, but upon the basis of force and tyranny—in short, upon war. There is, therefore, for the moralist the twin duty of constructing laws and principles for the true society founded upon an ethical basis, that is to say on conceptions of Justice, while at the same time he must give practical advice to his fellows living and striving in present society, where a continual state of war exists owing to the operation of force and tyranny in place of justice, and he must so _apply_ his principles that they may be capable of moving this unjust existing society progressively towards the ideal society. In our account of Renouvier’s “Philosophy of History” we brought out his insistence upon war as the essential feature of man’s life on this planet, as the basis of our present “civilisation.” Here he proclaims it again in his ethics.[21] War reigns everywhere: it is around us and within us—individuals, families, tribes, classes, nations and races. He includes in the term much more than open fighting with guns. The distribution of wealth, of property (especially of land), wages, custom duties, diplomacy, fraud, violence, bigotry, orthodoxy, and persecution, lies themselves, are all, to him, forms of war. Its most ludicrous stronghold is among men who pride themselves on being at peace with all men, while they force their idea of God upon other men’s consciences. Religious intolerance is one, and a very absurd kind of warfare.[22] [21] _Science de la Morale_, vol. I, p. 332. [22] Renouvier sums up its spirit in the words: “_Crois ce que je crois moi, où je te tue_” (_La Nouvelle Monadologie_).