ore than the Intuitionists sought to make
any fundamental change in the content of right and of wrong as
acknowledged by modern society. Their controversies were almost
entirely of what may be called an academic kind, and, however decided,
would have little effect upon a man's practical attitude. But it would
not be possible to make any such confident assertion regarding the
ethical controversies of the present day. We have no longer the same
common basis of agreement to rely upon that our predecessors had a
generation ago. There are many indications in recent literature that
the suggestion is now made more readily than it was twenty or thirty
years ago that the scale of moral values may have to be revised; and
it seems to me that the ethical controversies of the coming generation
will not be restricted to academic opponents whose disputes concern
nothing more than the origin of moral ideas and their ultimate
criterion. Modern controversy will involve these questions, but it
will go deeper and it will spread its results wider: it appears as
if it would not hesitate to call in question the received code of
morality, and to revise our standard of right and wrong. One school at
any rate has already made a claim of this sort, and the extravagance
of its teaching has not prevented it from attracting adherents.

It is on this ground, therefore,--because I believe that the ethical
question is no longer so purely an academic question as it was some
years ago, because it affects not only the philosophic thinker but the
practical man who is concerned with the problems of his day,--that I
have selected the topic for these lectures. It is not merely that many
modern writers assert some general doctrine as to the relativity of
right and wrong. So much was implied, though it was not much laid
stress upon, in the utilitarian doctrine. For the utilitarian conduct
is right according to the amount of happiness it produces: goodness
is relative to its tendency to produce happiness. But a much greater
importance may attach to the assertion of the relativity of morals
when one couples that doctrine with the idea now prevalent of the
indefinitely great changes which the progress of the race brings
about, not only in the social order but also in the structure and
faculties of man himself.

Hence it is not surprising to find that there are at the present day
some writers who ask for nothing less than a revision of the whole
traditional moral