reason for believing anything to be good in any sense, except that it is what would satisfy a particular kind of desire--the kind of desire which he tries to shew to be that of a moral agent. An unhappy alternative is before us. Such reasoning would give valid reasons for his conclusions, if, and only if, being good and being desired in a particular way were identical: and in this case, as we have seen in Chapter I., his conclusions would not be ethical. On the other hand, if the two are not identical, his conclusions may be ethical and may even be right, but he has not given us a single reason for believing them. The thing which a scientific Ethics is required to shew, namely that certain things are really good, he has assumed to begin with, in assuming that things which are willed in a certain way are always good. We may, therefore, have as much respect for Green’s conclusions as for those of any other man who details to us his ethical convictions: but that any of his arguments are such as to give us any reason for holding that Green’s convictions are more likely to be true than those of any other man, must be clearly denied. The _Prolegomena to Ethics_ is quite as far as Mr Spencer’s _Data of Ethics_, from making the smallest contribution to the solution of ethical problems. [22] _Prolegomena to Ethics_, p. 178. =85.= The main object of this chapter has been to shew that Metaphysics, understood as the investigation of a supposed supersensible reality, can have no logical bearing whatever upon the answer to the fundamental ethical question ‘What is good in itself?’ That this is so, follows at once from the conclusion of Chapter I., that ‘good’ denotes an ultimate, unanalysable predicate; but this truth has been so systematically ignored, that it seemed worth while to discuss and distinguish, in detail, the principal relations, which do hold, or have been supposed to hold, between Metaphysics and Ethics. With this view I pointed out:--(1) That Metaphysics may have a bearing on _practical_ Ethics--on the question ‘What ought we to do?’--so far as it may be able to tell us what the future effects of our action will be: what it can _not_ tell us is whether those effects are good or bad in themselves. One particular type of metaphysical doctrine, which is very frequently held, undoubtedly has such a bearing on _practical_ Ethics: for, if it is true that the sole reality is an eternal, immutable Absolute, then it follows that no actions of ours can have any real effect, and hence that no _practical_ proposition can be true. The same conclusion follows from the ethical proposition, commonly combined with this metaphysical one--namely that this eternal Reality is also the sole good (68). (2) That metaphysical writers, as where they fail to notice the contradiction just noticed between any _practical_ proposition and the assertion that an eternal reality is the sole good, seem frequently to confuse the proposition that