hich the moral element enters
only as a sort of loosely-connected appendix, the pragmatists are
amply justified. Practical ends are prior to theoretical explanations
of what happens. But practical ends vary, and some measure of their
relative values is needed.

There is one thing which all reasoning about morality assumes and
must assume; and that is morality itself. The moral concept--whether
described as worth or as duty or as goodness--cannot be distilled out
of any knowledge about the laws of existence or of occurrence. Nor
will speculation about the real conditions of experience yield it,
unless adequate recognition be first of all given to the fact that the
experience which is the subject-matter of philosophy is not merely a
sensuous and thinking, but also a moral, experience. The approval
of the good, the disapproval of the evil, and the preference of
the better: these would seem to be basal facts for an adequate
philosophical theory: and they imply the striving for a best--however
imperfect the apprehension of that best may always remain. Only
when these facts--the characteristic facts of moral experience--are
recognised as constituents of the experience which is our
subject-matter, are we in a position profitably to enquire what is
good and what evil, and how the best is to be conceived.

The recognition of these facts would only be a beginning; but it would
be a beginning which would avoid the cardinal error fallen into not
only by the leading exponents of evolutionist morality, but also to be
found in much of the ethical work of idealist metaphysicians. It seems
to have been assumed that moral principles can be reached by the
application of scientific generalisations or of the results of a
metaphysical analysis which has started by overlooking the facts
of the moral consciousness. Even as a metaphysic this procedure is
inadequate; and the interpretations of reality to which it has led
have erred by over-intellectuality.

The systems of naturalism and of idealism, whose ethical consequences
have been passed in review, have one feature in common; and it is
a feature which from of old has been regarded as a mark of genuine
philosophy. They both seek the One in the many; but they seek it on
different roads. For the naturalist the most comprehensive description
of things may be the conception of mass-points in motion; or it may be
some more recondite conception to which physical analysis points. In
either case