Another justification for seeking to judge of Pragmatism from the point of view of moral philosophy is that the whole weight of its “humanism” and of its “valuation” philosophy must inevitably fall upon its view of the moral judgment. Dr. Schiller, we have seen, is quite explicit in his opinion that for Humanism the roots of metaphysics “lie, and must lie,” in ethics. And this is all the more the case, as it were, on account of the proclamation[248] by Pragmatism of the inability of Intellectualism to understand morality, and also on account of its recurring contention in respect of the merely hypothetical character of all intellectual truth. Now, unfortunately for Pragmatism, the one thing that the otherwise illuminating book of Dewey and Tufts almost completely fails to do, as the writer has already sought to indicate, is to _provide a theory of the ordinary distinction between right and wrong_.[249] The only theme that is really successfully pursued in this typically American book is the “constant discovery, formation, and re-formation of the ‘self’ in the ‘ends’ which an individual is called upon to sustain and develop in virtue of his membership of a ‘social whole.’” But this is obviously a study in “genetic psychology,” or in the psychology of ethics, but by no means a study in the theory of ethics. “The controlling principle,” it characteristically tells us, “of the deliberation which renders possible the formation of a voluntary or socialized self out of our original instinctive impulses is the love of the objects which make this transformation possible.” But what is it, we wish to know, that distinguished the objects that make this transformation possible from the objects that do not do so? The only answer that we can see in the book is that anything is “moral” which makes possible a “transition from individualism to efficient social personality”---obviously again a purely sociological point of view, leaving the question of the standard of efficiency quite open. The whole tendency, in short, of the pragmatist treatment of ethical principles is to the effect that standards and theories of conduct are valuable only in so far as they are, to a certain extent, “fruitful” in giving us a certain “surveying power” in the perplexities and uncertainties of “direct personal behaviour.” They are all, in other words, merely relative or useful, and none of them is absolute and authoritative. It is this last thing, however, that is the real desideratum of ethical theory. And so far as practice is concerned, all that this Pragmatism or “Relativism” in morals inevitably leads to is the conclusion that whatever brings about a change, or a result, or a “new formation,” or a new “development” of the moral situation, is necessarily moral, that “growth” and “liberation” and “fruitfulness,” and “experimentation” are everything, and moral scruples and conscience simply nothing. In the celebrated