From early times downward we find in ethical speculations, references to the ideal man, his acts, his feelings, his judgments. Well-doing is conceived by Socrates as the doing of "the best man," who, "as a husbandman, performs well the duties of husbandry; as a surgeon, the duties of the medical art; in political life, his duty toward the commonwealth." Plato, in _Minos_, as a standard to which State law should conform, "postulates the decision of some ideal wise man," and in _Laches_ the wise man's knowledge of good and evil is supposed to furnish the standard: disregarding "the maxims of the existing society" as unscientific, Plato regards as the proper guide, that "Idea of the Good which only a philosopher can ascend to." Aristotle (_Eth._ Bk. iii. ch. 4), making the decisions of the good man the standard, says: "For the good man judges everything rightly, and in every case the truth appears so to him.... And, perhaps, the principal difference between the good and the bad man is that the good man sees the truth in every case, since he is, as it were, the rule and measure of it." The Stoics, too, conceived of "complete rectitude of action" as that "which none could achieve except the wise man"--the ideal man. And Epicurus had an ideal standard. He held the virtuous state to be "a tranquil, undisturbed, innocuous, non-competitive fruition, which approached most nearly to the perfect happiness of the gods," who "neither suffered vexation in themselves nor caused vexation to others."[L] If, in modern times, influenced by theological dogmas concerning the fall and human sinfulness, and by a theory of obligation derived from the current creed, moralists have less frequently referred to an ideal, yet references are traceable. We see one in the dictum of Kant--"Act according to the maxim only, which you can wish, at the same time, to become a universal law." For this implies the thought of a society in which the maxim is acted upon by all and universal benefit recognized as the effect: there is a conception of ideal conduct under ideal conditions. And though Mr. Sidgwick, in the quotation above made from him, implies that Ethics is concerned with man as he is, rather than with man as he should be; yet, in elsewhere speaking of Ethics as dealing with conduct as it should be, rather than with conduct as it is, he postulates ideal conduct and indirectly the ideal man. On his first page, speaking of Ethics along with Jurisprudence and Politics, he says that they are distinguished "by the characteristic that they attempt to determine not the actual but the ideal--what ought to exist, not what does exist."