J. W. NAHLOWSKY, ALLGEMEINE ETHIK. 427 Methods of Ethics is occupied with the examination of an ethical theory which has many points of resemblance to that worked out by Nahlowsky. The English " Intuitionists " claim universal validity for moral ideas, and defend the hnmediateness of the moral judgment in a way which closely resembles Herbart's. But they tend to an intellectual view of the moral consciousness which is alien to his, and to assimilate it to jural rather than aesthetic conceptions. This is perhaps the reason why the points of similarity between the ethical theory of Herbart and that of the English moralists have never been sufficiently emphasised. Trendelenburg indeed, in an interesting essay (Historische Beitrarje zur Philosophic, iii. 122 ft) points in this reference to Adam Smith's doctrine of the sympathy of a disinterested spectator as the criterion of a moral act, and to Hume's discussion of the relation between sentiment and reason. By means of the latter, Trendelenburg says, sympathy may be changed from a mere sensation as it was with Smith, into a conception of harmony such as we have in Herbart. But yet he concludes that " Herbart was the first for whom Taste was the practical law- giver," and that the fundamental notion of Herbart's Ethics the idea that "practical philosophy is a part of aesthetics" was original to him. Trendelenburg, however, does not go far enough back in tracing the descent of the ideas elaborated by Herbart. Smith and Hume were, in their views of morality, the lineal successors of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, both of whom were dominated by the aesthetic conception of morality. In Hutcheson specially, and particularly in his early Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, the perception of the morally good is expressly put on the same level as that of the beautiful or artistic, and the doctrine of the " moral sense" is explained in a way which gives it close affinities with the "judgment of taste" which is the Herbartian criterion both of beauty and moral good. The distinction between ethics and aesthetics (in the narrower sense) is indeed much more clearly drawn and moral principles generally more consecutively worked out in Herbart than in Hutcheson. Yet Herbart's fundamental view of the position of ethics might have been suggested to him by the earlier thinker. 1 No clearer statement of the Herbartian position on this question could be wished than that given by Nahlowsky. Ethics and ^Esthetics agree, he argues, in that both the beautiful and the moral please absolutely ; in both too the satisfaction depends on the completed presentation of a certain relation of connected members ; and both prescribe an ideal to be realised : hence they are both practical and have imperatives. 1 Herbart refers to Hutcheson, Werke, viii. 242, but not in a way that implies knowledge of Hutcheson's writings at first hand. There may, however, be other references.
