It is well now to raise the question what is the object of ethical enquiry. Is it merely scientific determination of the origin, growth, and variations of ethical opinion? Is it a natural history of human conduct, more particularly of that part of it called ethical? Is it an investigation into the natural authority of ethical injunction? Is the object to establish ethical authority, or to show that ethics has no authority, or to enable us to conform to it and administer it intelligently? Generally speaking, is it a scientific enquiry for the information of our minds, or is it investigated for the enforcement of ethical injunctions? It is to be presumed that we have both ends in view. Knowledge must precede power. Light must go before footsteps. At least, so it must be if intellect is to rule. As a matter of fact, Ethics has not been so much a reasoned out system of conduct as a worked out system to be afterwards reasoned about. Morality has been the interbalance, growth, and counterbalance of subjective and sympathetic individuals. Then it became something to reason about, to modify by reason in the the application to remoter ends and larger bodies of the principles out of which it arose. But the province of reason is not to supersede those principles, nor to weaken their authority, which indeed it could not do, for the forces which produced morality are ever present to sustain it, and, indeed, acquire age after age an increasing force. FOOTNOTES: [9] Data of Ethics, p. 78. [10] Ibid, p. 78. [11] Ibid, p. 25. CHAPTER IV. THE SOCIOLOGICAL VIEW.