2. His innovations may be either negative and destructive, or positive and supplementary. There are certain important general reasons against an innovation of the former kind, which may, in any given case, easily outweigh the special arguments in its favour. 480-484 3. Generally, a Utilitarian in recommending, by example or precept, a deviation from an established rule of conduct, desires his innovation to be generally imitated. But in some cases he may neither expect nor desire such imitation; though cases of this kind are rare and difficult to determine. 485-492 4. There are no similar difficulties in the way of modifying the Ideal of Moral Excellence--as distinguished from the dictates of Moral Duty--in order to render it more perfectly felicific. 492-495 CONCLUDING CHAPTER THE MUTUAL RELATIONS OF THE THREE METHODS 1. It is not difficult to combine the Intuitional and Utilitarian methods into one; but can we reconcile Egoistic and Universalistic Hedonism? 496-498 2. In so far as the latter coincides with Common Sense, we have seen in Book ii. chap. v. that no complete reconciliation is possible, on the basis of experience. 498-499 3. Nor does a fuller consideration of Sympathy, as a specially Utilitarian sanction, lead us to modify this conclusion; in spite of the importance that is undoubtedly to be attached to sympathetic pleasures. 499-503 4. The Religious Sanction, if we can show that it is actually attached to the Utilitarian Code, is of course adequate: 503-506 5. but its existence cannot be demonstrated by ethical arguments alone. Still, without this or some similar assumption, a fundamental contradiction in Ethics cannot be avoided. 506-509 APPENDIX ON KANT’S CONCEPTION OF FREE WILL 511 INDEX 517 BOOK I CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION § 1. The boundaries of the study called Ethics are variously and often vaguely conceived: but they will perhaps be sufficiently defined, at the outset, for the purposes of the present treatise, if a ‘Method of Ethics’ is explained to mean any rational procedure by which we determine what individual human beings ‘ought’--or what it is ‘right’ for them--to do, or to seek to realise by voluntary action.[9] By using the word “individual” I provisionally distinguish the study of Ethics from that of Politics,[10] which seeks to determine the proper constitution and the right public conduct of governed societies: both Ethics and Politics being, in my view, distinguished from positive sciences by having as their special and primary object to determine what ought to be, and not to ascertain what merely is, has been, or will be.