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498 E. R. MABETT : it a science of ' bridge- work '. It embodies the effort to synthesise inner and outer, character and conduct, psycho- logical condition and ' environmental ' condition ; or, failing that, to unravel the tangle of action and reaction by a double system of clues. Hence in its dominant aspect Ethics is ' evolutionary '. Now this epithet stinks in the nostrils of many respectable persons, but not on account of its strictly scientific or philosophical connotation. After all it is but a word. ' Material ' or ' Comparative ' are words approved by an older generation that will serve the present purpose equally well. We cannot without self-contradiction conceive of the cosmos as being an evolution a genesis. On the other hand it palpably has features that are genetic ; and Ethics primarily examines certain of these. A purely evolutionary or material science of Ethics, however, could not, as we have already seen, exist. However concrete, however com- prehensive of nature in its variety and flux, it may aspire to be, it needs a Formal Part to keep it stable and self-centred, not indeed by dwelling on the few bare transcendental points wherein human morality would seem to remain untouched by process altogether, but rather by keeping in line with ethical discovery and giving ' form ' to its results so as to enable these to be the more readily utilised as a means for procuring fresh knowledge and for bringing the latter in its turn into formal consistency with ethical thought as a whole. Or to go into the Methodology of Ethics a little more fully a subject by the way that has for the most part been unduly neglected by moral theorists I would not have the Formal Part of Ethics confounded with that Metaphysical Appendix to Ethics, as it might be called, which may con- veniently be allowed to supplement its shortcomings as a particular science by suggesting grounds for some ' larger hope ' based on considerations commensurate with human science as a whole. Thus for example to endeavour, as Aristotle does, to summate the particular ends of the moral life the particular this and that good object which practical reason sets before us by representing that life as a process of trying to become, as far as a man can, like, or one with, God is simply to point beyond the horizon of ethical science as such to a region where time-conditions cease to count ; and the philosopher therefore very properly reserves his investigation of the nature of God the etSos el&wv for a work dealing specifically with those problems which have ever since been known by the name of ' metaphysical '. So too Kant when he seeks to establish the nature of that which