The question of the ethical end should first appear as the question of the sociological end.  For what purpose or purposes is society maintained?  All the ethical difficulties are here met by anticipation, and in a form much better adapted to their solution.  It is from the point of view of the social ruler, that you learn reserve, moderation, and sobriety in your aims; you learn to think that something much less than the Utopias—­universal happiness and universal virtue—­should be propounded; you find that a definite and limited province can be assigned, separating what the social power is able to do, must do, and can advantageously do, from what it is unable to do, need not do, and cannot with advantage do; and this or a similar demarcation is reproducible in ethics.

[PRECEPTS OF ETHICS MAINLY SOCIAL.]

The precepts of ethics are mainly the precepts of social authority; at all events the social precepts and their sanctions have the priority in scientific method.  Some of the highest virtues are sociological; patriotic self-sacrifice is one of the conditions of social preservation.  The inculcation of this and of many other virtues would not appear in ethics at all, or only in a supplementary treatment, if social science took its proper sphere, and fully occupied that sphere.

Once more.  The great problem of moral control, which I would remove entirely from a science of education, would be first dealt with in Sociology.  It there appears in the form of the choice and gradation of punishments, in prison discipline, and in the reformation of criminals,—­all which have been made the subject of enlightened, not to say scientific, treatment.  It is in the best experience in those subjects that I would begin to seek for lights on the comprehensive question.  I would next go to diplomacy for the arts of delicate address in reconciling opposing interests; after which I would look to the management of parties and conflicting interests in the State.  I would farther inquire how armies are disciplined, and subordination combined with the enthusiasm that leads to noble deeds.

There is an abundant field for the application of pure psychology to ethics, when it takes its own proper ground.  The exact psychological character of disinterested impulse needs to be assigned; and, if that impulse can be fully referred to the sympathetic or social instincts and habits, the supposed moral faculty is finally eviscerated of its contents for all ethical purposes.

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So far I have exemplified what seems to me real or genuine aims and applications of metaphysical study.  I now proceed to the objects that are more or less factitious.  We are here on delicate ground, and run the risk of discrediting our pursuit, as regards the very things that in the eyes of many people make its value.

First, then, as psychology involves all our sensibilities, pleasures, affections, aspirations, capacities, it is thought on that ground to have a special nobility and greatness, and a special power of evoking in the student the feelings themselves.  The mathematician, dealing with conic sections, spirals, and differential equations, is in danger of being ultimately resolved into a function or a co-efficient; the metaphysician, by investigating conscience, must become conscientious; driving fat oxen is the way to grow fat.