NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
While this volume contains about the same amount of matter as Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers, both the plan of the book and the relative space devoted to the several divisions of the subject are quite different. As will be remembered, Sidgwick's Outlines, first published in 1886 and revised two years later, was an enlargement and substantial revision of his article on "Ethics," written several years before for the Encyclopædia Britannica. Needless to say, the eminence of the author and the qualities of the book itself contributed to give the Outlines a wide popularity; but, while it is still useful and will doubtless long remain so, there are some respects in which it can hardly fail to impress the present day reader as rather old- fashioned. Sidgwick is admirably fair, on the whole, in his treatment of the historic systems; but the center of interest in ethical speculation has shifted a good deal in the past quarter of a century and a correspondingly different emphasis upon certain fundamental conceptions would inevitably suggest itself to an equally thorough and original writer at the present day. On the one hand, the total influence of T. H. Green (whose Prolegomena to Ethics had been published, posthumously, only three years before the first edition of the Outlines) has proved much more far-reaching than Sidgwick could have anticipated, extending far beyond those who, by any latitude of classification, could be regarded as belonging to his school. In fact, it would seem like mere eccentricity for a writer today to exclude 'self-realization' as one of the 'methods of ethics' that have to be taken seriously, though this principle would probably be interpreted in a less metaphysical sense than it was by Green himself. And, on the other hand, Sidgwick's own peculiar view that 'egoism' must be regarded as one of the fundamental 'methods of ethics'—which was bound to influence in some degree his account of the history of ethics—certainly has not gained in plausibility since the Outlines was written. But, in addition to such considerations, it must be remembered that Evolutional ethics has developed into something much more definite and significant than it was a quarter of a century ago, while our knowledge of the actual 'data' of ethics has been greatly increased.
It is with this different background of contemporary tendencies that Mr. Rogers has undertaken to trace the history of ethics in as compendious fashion as Sidgwick did a generation ago. Sidgwick apparently wrote for the average intelligent reader, without special reference to pedagogical considerations. Mr. Rogers, on the other hand, seems to have had particularly in mind those who have very little, if any, knowledge of philosophy or of ethics. Whether
