Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/234

The characteristic difference between the ethical thought of the present day and that of the nineteenth century as a whole is, in Mr. Sorley's judgment, the removal of the limitation of scope which attached to the latter. "The controversies of the time centered almost exclusively round two questions: the question of the origin of moral ideas, and the question of the criterion of moral value." Both schools were agreed regarding the content of morality. "The Utilitarians no more than the Intuitionists were opponents of the traditional—as we may call it—the Christian morality of modern civilization. ... This limitation of the controversy tended to a precision and clearness in method which is often wanting in the ethical thought of the present day, disturbed as it is by new and more far-reaching problems. ... We have no longer the same common basis of agreement to rely upon that our predecessors had a generation ago. There are many indications in recent literature that the suggestion is now made more readily than it was twenty or thirty years ago that the scale of moral values may have to be revised; and it seems to me that the ethical controversies of the coming generation will not be restricted to academic opponents whose disputes concern nothing more than the origin of moral ideas and their ultimate criterion. Modern controversy will involve these questions, but it will go deeper and it will spread its results wider: it appears as if it would not hesitate to call in question the received code of morality, and to revise our standard of right and wrong." The new alternative is, in reality, between an altruistic and an egoistic interpretation of morality. "The Utilitarian writers of last century were of course conscious of this problem, conscious that there was a possible discrepancy between egoistic conduct and altruistic conduct; but they agreed to lay stress upon altruistic results as determining moral quality. Their tendency was to minimize the difference between the egoistic and the altruistic effects of action, and in so far as a difference had to be allowed to emphasize the importance of the claims of the community at large, that is, roughly speaking, to take the altruistic standpoint. Recent and more careful investigators have brought out more exactly the extent and significance of the divergence. In particular this was done with perfect clearness and precision by the late Professor Sidgwick." The new tendency in contemporary thought, therefore, takes the form of an assertion of egoism as against Christian altruism. Its great representative is Nietzsche, who "in spite of all his extravagances or, perhaps, because of them is symptomatic of certain tendencies of the age." These tendencies are the result not so much of the influ-