be and must be answered solely by an empirical investigation of the question what was desired; so here, if to be good means to have some supersensible property, the ethical question can and must be answered by a metaphysical enquiry into the question, What has this property? What, then, remains to be done in order to destroy the plausibility of Metaphysical Ethics, is to expose the chief errors which seem to have led metaphysicians to suppose that to be good _means_ to possess some supersensible property. =73.= What, then, are the chief reasons which have made it seem plausible to maintain that to be good must _mean_ to possess some supersensible property or to be related to some supersensible reality? We may, first of all, notice one, which seems to have had some influence in causing the view that good must be defined by _some_ such property, although it does not suggest any _particular_ property as the one required. This reason lies in the supposition that the proposition ‘This is good’ or ‘This would be good, if it existed’ must, in a certain respect, be of the same type as other propositions. The fact is that there is one type of proposition so familiar to everyone, and therefore having such a strong hold upon the imagination, that philosophers have always supposed that all other types must be reducible to it. This type is that of the objects of experience--of all those truths which occupy our minds for the immensely greater part of our waking lives: truths such as that somebody is in the room, that I am writing or eating or talking. All these truths, however much they may differ, have this in common that in them both the grammatical subject and the grammatical predicate stand for something which exists. Immensely the commonest type of truth, then, is one which asserts a relation between two existing things. Ethical truths are immediately felt not to conform to this type, and the naturalistic fallacy arises from the attempt to make out that, in some roundabout way, they do conform to it. It is immediately obvious that when we see a thing to be good, its goodness is not a property which we can take up in our hands, or separate from it even by the most delicate scientific instruments, and transfer to something else. It is not, in fact, like most of the predicates which we ascribe to things, a _part_ of the thing to which we ascribe it. But philosophers suppose that the reason why we cannot take goodness up and move it about, is not that it is a different _kind_ of object from any which can be moved about, but only that it _necessarily_ exists together with anything with which it does exist. They explain the type of ethical truths by supposing it identical with the type of scientific laws. And it is only when they have done this that the naturalistic philosophers proper--those who are empiricists--and those whom I have called ‘metaphysical’ part company. These two classes of philosophers do, indeed, differ with