tional and practical power.]

Prerational morality is vigorous because it is sincere. Actual
interests, rooted habits, appreciations the opposite of which is
inconceivable and contrary to the current use of language, are embodied
in special precepts; or they flare up of themselves in impassioned
judgments. It is hardly too much to say, indeed, that prerational
morality is morality proper. Rational ethics, in comparison, seems a
kind of politics or wisdom, while post-rational systems are essentially
religions. If we thus identify morality with prerational standards, we
may agree also that morality is no science in itself, though it may
become, with other matters, a subject for the science of anthropology;
and Hume, who had never come to close quarters with any rational or
post-rational ideal, could say with perfect truth that morality was not
founded on reason. Instinct is of course not founded on reason, but
_vice versa_; and the maxims enforced by tradition or conscience are
unmistakably founded on instinct. They might, it is true, become
materials for reason, if they were intelligently accepted, compared, and
controlled; but such a possibility reverses the partisan and spasmodic
methods which Hume and most other professed moralists associate with
ethics. Hume's own treatises on morals, it need hardly be said, are pure
psychology. It would have seemed to him conceited, perhaps, to inquire
what ought really to be done. He limited himself to asking what men
tended to think about their doings.

The chief expression of rational ethics which a man in Hume's world
would have come upon lay in the Platonic and Aristotelian writings; but
these were not then particularly studied nor vitally understood. The
chief illustration of post-rational morality that could have fallen
under his eyes, the Catholic religion, he would never have thought of as
a philosophy of life, but merely as a combination of superstition and
policy, well adapted to the lying and lascivious habits of Mediterranean
peoples. Under such circumstances ethics could not be thought of as a
science; and whatever gradual definition of the ideal, whatever
prescription of what ought to be and to be done, found a place in the
thoughts of such philosophers formed a part of their politics or
religion and not of their reasoned knowledge.

[Sidenote: Moral science is an application of dialectic, not a part of
anthropology.]

There is, however, a dialectic of the will; a