But what, for ethical purposes, _is_ this drift and tendency? What significance do I mean to attach to the terms moral good and moral evil? It is hardly necessary to say that I do not propose in a couple of chapters of one short book to elaborate an ethical system with all its groundwork, and with details ramifying into every branch of ethical action, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has essayed to do in his Data of Ethics. All I can do here, or in any section of this book, is to indicate a _way_ of looking at things—at nature, at human life, at art—in which the meaning of the universe has seemed to become intelligible and satisfying to my own thought. Having found the way, every one must use it for himself or herself. I can, in the present work, go no further into detail than is necessary to make my meaning clear; to set whatever readers I may find at my point of view. If I can at all succeed in doing this, let them use their own eyes: they will find a wonderful landscape, vital, fresh and boundless, opening before them. The conception of ethical law which I wish to put forward differs from what is commonly understood as evolutionary or scientific ethics at the present day. This system appears ultimately to rest on Jeremy Bentham as its founder, but Bentham’s later disciples have modified his doctrine at various points by a deeper appreciation of the difficulties of the position. They have approximated more closely to what I consider to be the truth, but they have never shaken off the entanglement of the original false position of the modern founder of the school. Bentham, who pursued “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” through the medium of the most depressing system of philosophy which the world has ever known, made Pleasure the ultimate criterion of moral action and declared for the summary striking out of the word ‘ought’ from the language of morals, as corresponding to an idea which, so far as it rested on any reality, was merely a relic of primitive superstition.[142] But J. S. Mill saw that the sentiment of duty and moral obligation was based on something deeper and more instinctive than a word misunderstood, and that it often survived in persons singularly free from superstition. He sought its origin in the psychology and physiology of man, and interpreted it, on the principle of association of ideas, as a survival of the deep impression made by punishments and rewards attached respectively to different classes of actions in each man’s early life.[143] The position was a more rational and scientific one than that of Bentham, but it still failed to account for the _a priori_ character of the moral sense, the ready responsiveness with which early training evokes in man the sentiment of duty.