[SOCIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ETHICS.]

An allusion so very slender to so vast a subject as sociology would be a waste of words, but for the conviction, that through sociology is the way to the great field of Ethics.  This is to reverse the traditional arrangement—­ethics, politics, or government—­followed even by Bentham.  The lights of ethics are, in the first instance, psychological; its discussions presuppose a number of definitions and distinctions that are pure psychology.  But before these have to be adduced, the subject has to be set forth as a problem of sociology.  “How is the King’s government to be carried on?” “How is society to be held together?” is the first consideration; and the sociologist—­as constitution-builder, administrator, judge—­is the person to grapple with the problem.  It is with him that law, obligation, right, command, obedience, sanction, have their origin and their explanation.  Ethics is an important supplement to social or political law.  But it is still a department of law.  In any other view it is a maze, a mystery, a hopeless embroilment.

That ethics is involved in society is of course admitted; what is not admitted is, that ethical terms should be settled under the social science in the first place.  I may refer to the leading term “law,” whose meaning in sociology is remarkably clear; in ethics remarkably the reverse.  The confusion deepens when the moral faculty is brought forward.  In the eye of the sociologist, nothing could be simpler than the conception of that part of our nature that is appealed to for securing obedience.  He assumes a certain effort of the intelligence for understanding the signification of a command or a law; and, for the motive part, he counts upon nothing but volition in its most ordinary form—­the avoidance of a pain.  Intelligence and Will, in their usual and recognised workings, are all that are required for social obedience; law is conceived and framed exactly to suit the every-day and every-hour manifestations of these powers.  The lawgiver does not speak of an obedience-faculty, nor even of a social-faculty.  If there were in the mind a power unique and apart, having nothing in common with our usual intelligence, and nothing in common with our usual will or volition, that power ought to be expressed in terms that exclude the smallest participation of both knowledge and will; it ought to have a form special to itself, and not the form:—­“Do this, and ye shall be made to suffer”.

I am quite aware that there are elements in ethics not included in the problem of social obedience; what I contend for is, that the ground should be cleared by marking out the two provinces, as is actually done by a very small number of theorists, of whom John Austin is about the best example.

The ethical philosopher, from not building on a foregone sociology, is obliged to extemporize, in a paragraph, the social system; just as the physical philosopher would, if he had no regularly constructed mathematics to fall back upon, but had to stop every now and then to enunciate a mathematical theorem.