of the music that most delights us, consist, nor how it awakens the feeling it does. We can not tell just what it is in the poem we admire that gives its rhythm, figures of speech and imagery such enchanting power. The literature on the subject is extensive. We have, as all who read Ruskin’s[3] works know, a rich treasure of astute observations, with keen, incisive criticisms, but yet no thorough analysis of all the materials necessary to complete the science of Æsthetics. MORAL SCIENCE, OR ETHICS. The science of duty, often called _moral_ as relating to customs or habits of thought and action, discusses human obligations, or inquires what responsible voluntary agents ought to do, and why. Man has a moral nature; is so constituted, and placed in such relations that he feels certain things to be right for him, and others wrong; he says: I ought to do this, and that I ought not. These words, or their equivalents, expressive of obligation, can be traced in all languages of which we have any knowledge, and they voice the common sentiment of the race. Men differ widely in their intelligence, and consequently in their ability to discriminate with respect to acts or states that are purely intellectual. Their metaphysics may be cloudy and confused, so that their judgments on such matters will have neither agreement nor authority. But the moral sense discovers moral qualities more clearly. Its decisions are prompt, and their authority is acknowledged. Speculative questions on the subject are not all answered with the same agreement. If it is asked _why_ a thing is right, different persons may answer differently. One says because it is useful; another because it is commanded by a higher authority; and another because it accords with the fitness of things. These are questions for the intellect and not for the moral sense. Its province is simply to decide whether the act or state is right or not, and there it stops. Whether the basis of the rectitude approved is in some quality of the act itself, in an antecedent, or a consequent, may be properly asked, and reasons assigned for the answers given. But such questions are speculative, and the answers do not have, even when the best are given, the force of a moral conviction. In saying a thing is right because it is right, we affirm our conviction of the fact, but tacitly confess we may not know all the reasons why. How the fact is known is sufficiently explained by a reference to consciousness. We are so constituted that when moral qualities, in ourselves or others, are fairly presented and understood, there arise feelings of approval or condemnation, corresponding to that which excites them. Of such convictions and emotions we are at once conscious, and can have no more certain knowledge of anything than of what is thus felt. Connecting them with their exciting cause, it, too, is known, not by any outward or sense perception, yet not less certainly by an inward moral sense, whose