at it was analysing
truth; while the only view to which it really attributes truth is its
view of the system of facts open to possible experience, a system
which those figments presuppose and which they may help us in part to
divine, where it is accidentally hidden from human inspection.

IV. HYPOSTATIC ETHICS

If Mr. Russell, in his essay on "The Elements of Ethics," had wished
to propitiate the unregenerate naturalist, before trying to convert
him, he could not have chosen a more skilful procedure; for he begins
by telling us that "what is called good conduct is conduct which is a
means to other things which are good on their own account; and hence
... the study of what is good or bad on its own account must be
included in ethics." Two consequences are involved in this: first,
that ethics is concerned with the economy of all values, and not with
"moral" goods only, or with duty; and second, that values may and do
inhere in a great variety of things and relations, all of which it is
the part of wisdom to respect, and if possible to establish. In this
matter, according to our author, the general philosopher is prone to
one error and the professed moralist to another. "The philosopher,
bent on the construction of a system, is inclined to simplify the
facts unduly ... and to twist them into a form in which they can all
be deduced from one or two general principles. The moralist, on the
other hand, being primarily concerned with conduct, tends to become
absorbed in means, to value the actions men ought to perform more than
the ends which such actions serve.... Hence most of what they value in
this world would have to be omitted by many moralists from any
imagined heaven, because there such things as self-denial and effort
and courage and pity could find no place.... Kant has the bad eminence
of combining both errors in the highest possible degree, since he
holds that there is nothing good except the virtuous will--a view
which simplifies the good as much as any philosopher could wish, and
mistakes means for ends as completely as any moralist could enjoin."

Those of us who are what Mr. Russell would call ethical sceptics will
be delighted at this way of clearing the ground; it opens before us
the prospect of a moral philosophy that should estimate the various
values of things known and of things imaginable, showing what
combinations of goods are possible in any one rational system, and
(if fancy could stretch so far