Any code of morality which is not directly in contact with life is worthless, and all ethical ideas which are not those of our time are of little value. Only he is truly a man who lives the life of his time. The truly moral man is he who is alive to this spirit and who does not unreflectingly deduce his rules of conduct from ancient books or teachers of a past age. The art of living is the supreme art, and it is this which the great moralists have endeavoured to show humanity. Neither Socrates nor Jesus wrote down their ethical ideas: they lived them. Rauh thus reminds us partly of Guyau in his insistence upon life. He regards the ethical life at its highest, as one _sans obligation ni sanction_. Rather than the Kantian obligation of duty, of constraint, he favours in his second book, _L’Expérience morale_, a state of spontaneity, of passion and exaltation of the personal conscience which faces the issue in a disinterested manner. The man who is morally honest himself selects his values, his ideals, his ends, by the light which reason gives him. Ethics becomes thus an independent science, a science of “ends,” which Reason, as reflected in the personal conscience, acclaims a science of the ideal ordering of life. Such was Rauh’s conception of rational moral experience, one which he endeavoured to apply in his lectures to the two problems which he considered to be supreme in his time, that of patriotism and of social justice. These problems were further touched upon in 1896, when Léon Bourgeois (since noted for his advocacy of the “League of Nations”) published his little work _Solidarité_, which was also a further contribution to an independent, positive and lay morality. In the conception of the solidarity of humanity throughout the ages, Bourgeois accepted the teaching of the sociologists, and urges that herein can be found an obligation, for the present generation must repay their debt to their ancestors and be worthy of the social heritage which has made them what they are. Somewhat similar sentiments had Been expressed by Marion in his Solidarité morale (1880). Ethical questions were kept in the forefront by the society known as _L’Union pour l’Action morale_, founded by Desjardins and supported by Lagneau (1851- 1894). After the excitement of the Dreyfus case (1894- 1899) this society took the name _L’Union pour la Verité_. In 1902 Lapie made an eloquent plea for a rational morality in his _Logique de la Volonté_, and in the following year Séailles published his _Affirmations de la Conscience moderne_. The little _Précis_ of André Lalande, written in the form of a catechism, was a further contribution to the establishment of a rational and independent lay morality, which the teaching of ethics as a subject in the _lycées_ and lay schools rendered in some degree necessary.[40] This little work appeared in 1907, the same year in which Paul Bureau wrote his book _La Crise morale des Temps nouveaux_.