This question of the ethical end _or_ highest good is thus fundamental in ethical science, and upon it all other questions in ethics finally depend. But it is easy to see that it does not cover the whole field, and that the other points of view already referred to have a legitimate application. Ethics has not only to determine the end, but to apply it to practice, and so to decide as to what is right or wrong in particular actions, and virtuous or vicious in character. And, in addition to the two questions thus implied--the question as to the ethical end, and that as to the application of it to practical affairs--there is another department of inquiry which has had a place assigned to it in most ethical systems, and which has a right to be regarded as belonging to ethics. We may investigate the place, in the individual and the community respectively, both of the sentiments and ideas and of the social institutions and customs through which morality is manifested; and this inquiry covers the twofold ground of what may be called moral psychology and moral sociology. [Sidenote: (_c_) distinct from other ethical questions:] Of these three questions, the first forms the subject of inquiry in the following pages. It seems to me that a great part of the obscurity which surrounds ethical argument is due to confounding these different questions. It is true that no one of them is without bearing on the others; but it is none the less necessary, in discussing any one of them, to keep its distinctness from those others well in view. In inquiring into the foundation on which the ethical end is based, I do not intend to develop a code of rules for practical conduct or a theory of human virtue; nor shall I attempt to trace the origin and nature of moral sentiments and ideas, or of the social institutions and customs connected with morality. If these subjects have to be introduced at all, it will be only in so far as they may be thought to decide, or tend to decide, the question more immediately in view. [Sidenote: (α) from inquiry into the methods of ethics.] [Sidenote: Limitation of this inquiry] [Sidenote: (_aa_) from necessity of investigating all logical alternatives,]