l, nor any tenable suggestion offered for
distinguishing it from evil.

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 419.]

This is the fundamental question for any philosophy of ethics; but it
receives no answer at all from the prevailing school of metaphysical
thought. This school offers no solution of the problem which was found
insoluble by the type of philosophy whose aim is to co-ordinate the
results of science. A comparison of the purposes and results of the
two schools may be instructive.

Mr Herbert Spencer has told us that since the time of his first essay,
"written as far back as 1842," his "ultimate purpose, lying behind all
proximate purposes, has been that of finding for the principles of right
and wrong in conduct at large a scientific basis.... Now that moral
injunctions are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred
origin, the secularisation of morals is becoming imperative. Few things
can happen more disastrous than the decay and death of a regulative
system no longer fit, before another and fitter regulative system has
grown up to replace it.... Those who believe that the vacuum can be
filled, and that it must be filled, are called on to do something in
pursuance of their belief."[1] But more than fifty years after the
publication of this first essay, as, with the completion of the
'Principles of Ethics,' his whole system of philosophy lay unrolled
before him, he made the significant and pathetic confession that "the
doctrine of evolution has not furnished guidance to the extent I had
hoped.... Right regulation of the actions of so complex a being as man,
living under conditions so complex as those presented by a society,
evidently forms a subject-matter unlikely to admit of definite
conclusions throughout its entire range."[2] And the lack of confidence
which the author himself felt in these parts, there is good reason to
extend to the whole structure of evolutionary ethics.

[Footnote 1: Preface to Data of Ethics, 1879.]

[Footnote 2: Preface to Principles of Ethics, vol. ii., 1893.]

Neither the purpose of their structure nor its collapse is so
explicitly proclaimed by the metaphysicians with whom this lecture has
dealt. But we hardly need to read between the lines in order to see
the prominence of the moral interest in all that Green wrote; and it
was after he had shown the inadequacy of the empirical method in the
hands of Hume to give any criterion or ideal for conduct that he made
h