Again, there are those who regard ethics solely as a subject for philosophical discussion on the basis of an ideal never illustrated by any one man, but only conceived in abstract terms. “How should the ideal man behave?” is the sole burden of their discussion. Even the mechanist hesitates to condemn this esthetic attitude toward conduct too severely. For it is well known that thinking may involve preparation for action, and that consequently he who thinks out the best course of conduct in advance may be more likely to act accordingly when a real problem is to be solved. On the other hand, the human body and brain are so constructed that all fanciful romancing is necessarily tinged with delusion to such an extent that he who conceives an ideal apart from the actual is bound to lose his orientation. And the sequel of this loss is everywhere manifest in purely philosophical discussions about ethics. In the effort to extricate themselves from the verbalism in which they are entangled, ethical theorists have invariably either rejected the world as evil, or else they have dug themselves in under a mountain of meaningless words. To all such persons a mechanistic ethics seeks to restore a glimpse of the reality they have sought in vain, by showing that the highest ideals need not be in any way fictitious. Resistance to a naturalistic ethics may also be expected from those biologists and physiologists who regard the human body essentially as a corpse animated by a psyche. These people are known as vitalists, and their number is very great. The customary gloom of these men is doubtless derived from their attitude toward the human body, which they know best either in the form of specimens preserved in alcohol, or microscopic slides of slaughtered tissue. Now, to be sure, such objects of intense study do not of themselves yield an adequate picture of a living, thinking man. But these morphologically-minded persons, instead of pertinaciously remembering what manner of organism they have slain for research, and instead of keeping ever in mind that all human tissues actually die while performing their normal functions, deem it somehow necessary to postulate a vital, that is, an immortal principle, which makes the organism _go_. A more perverse logic does not arise even in the realms of theology. Oddly enough, the conversation of these men is not so happy as their metaphysic might indicate. “No, no,” they will repeat in a plaintive outcry, “you can never find the secret of life.” The sentiment underlying such a remark is not difficult for even a casual student of psychology to detect. Moreover, logicians know that when a man states a problem in terms of a mystery, and seeks thereby to hinder the search for its solution, he commits an error which has been called “the fallacy of initial predication.”[1] Obviously, indeed, we have already found out fully a thousand of the secrets of living matter,—for instance, its principal chemical ingredients,