alternative, that which is conceived as good. The good is the obligatory. Instead of deriving duty from good like the ancient moralists, we may, with Kant, explain good in terms of duty. "For ourselves we cannot hesitate between the two views which have been indicated. To seek first to account for obligation by the special characteristics of the good, to say that obligation attaches to what is good, to what is recognized as good independently of its obligatoriness upon the will, is to make the good a motive, doubtless very superior to all others, but a motive which does not act differently from the others. Our analysis of the experience of obligation forbids this. We are therefore led to adopt the view of Kant, and to define the good thus: that which is obligatory" (p. 130). "The good in itself is the obligatory. The agreeable, the useful, the true, and the beautiful are resonances of the good, not its essence; its consequences not its substance" (p. 131). It follows that the only true method of discovering the content of the good is the method of obedience to duty.
Theories of moral obligation are divisible into two classes: (1) those which attempt to reduce obligation to some better known element in human nature, (2) those which attempt to relate obligation to a foreign influence exerted upon man. The former refer obligation to the ego, the latter to the non-ego. The author's view lies between the two. He finds the source of obligation not in the conscious, but in the unconscious ego. For the explanation of this unconscious ego—of its constant and unchangeable direction of the conscious self, of its absoluteness and its sacredness, he has recourse to the action of God. "The intervention of God alone, and in the form of his direction of the unconscious ego, can confer upon obligation its authority and its majesty" (p. 282). Such a view, he holds, conserves the best results of previous efforts made in both directions, that of the ego and that of the non-ego.
The theories considered in the third, or historical, part of the work, are those of Kant, Schopenhauer, Renouvier, Spencer, Secrétan, Fouillée and Guyau.
As the sub-title indicates, this essay is an analysis of the concepts 'ought' and 'good.' Such an analysis the author regards as the precondition of a true ethical theory. Philosophy is the critic of popular concepts, and the cause of its failure, in ethics as elsewhere, is that it has not risen to the dignity of its office, but has been led by its desire to find acceptance with the popular mind to adopt for its own the uncriticised concepts of common sense, and, with these concepts, the confusion and self-contradiction which they carry with them. 'Ought' and 'good' are here investigated as the fundamental concepts of ethics, which Dr. Bon defines as die Wissenschaft vom Sittlich-Guten. He finds it necessary, however, to consider the other meanings of both 'ought' and 'good,' and thus to dig about the roots of other sciences as well.
