Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS INTRODUCTION 1. A Wrlter who seeks to gain general confidence scarcely goes the right way to work when he begins with asking whether there really is such a subject as that of which he proposes to treat; whether it is one to which enquiry can be directed with any prospect of a valuable result. Yet to a writer on Moral Philosophy such a mode of procedure is prescribed, not only by the logical impulse to begin at the beginning, but by observation of the prevalent opinions around him. He can scarcely but be aware that Moral Philosophy is a name of somewhat equivocal repute; that it commands less respect among us than was probably the case a century ago; and that any one who professes to teach or write upon a subject to which this name is in any proper or distinctive sense applicable, is looked upon with some suspicion. There is, indeed, no lack of utterance in regard to the great problems of life or the rights and wrongs of human . conduct. Nor does it by any means confine itself to what are commonly counted secular or ' positive' considerations. Guesses as to some 'sweet strange mystery, Of what beyond these things may lie, And yet remain unseen, ' are announced with little reserve and meet with ready acceptance. These, we may say, are for the multitude of the educated, who have wearied of the formulas of a stereotyped theology, but still demand free indulgence for the appetite which that theology supplied with a regulation-diet. But the highest poetry of our time?that in which the most serious and select spirits find their food?depends chiefly for its interest on what has been well called ' the application of ideas to life;' and the ideas so applied are by no means sensibly verifiable. They belong as little to the domain of natural scienc..