Mr. Joad professes a two-fold object in writing this book: first, that of demonstrating the irrelevance for the actual problems of life of philosophical Ethics, and, secondly, of indicating a method likely to yield more practical results. The failure of traditional Ethics, he tells us, is the inevitable result of its method, the method of apriori reasoning which deduces conclusions from metaphysical principles. This is an interesting, it may even be a fascinating, intellectual game, but the trouble with it is that it has nothing to do with life. For while logical systems may be coherent and complete and definitive, life is various, changing, elusive; it is tentative, provisional, inconclusive. Hence any one who, like the author, is convinced that "Ethics really ought to have something to do with life" will start with the observation of life and be glad if his results fall into any order at all. Such is the procedure which Mr. Joad believes that empirical or 'common-sense' Ethics must follow.
While Mr. Joad does not keep the impatient reader waiting long to learn his opinion of traditional ethical systems, he endeavors to justify this unfavorable judgment by a hundred-page exposition of Utilitarianism, Intuitionism, and Platonism in Ethics, which, however, he advises the reader to skip if (as he seems to think more than likely) the reader dislikes philosophy. The advice is bad and the reader who follows it will miss one of the best parts of the book. The exposition is keen and clear, frequently viewing its subject-matter from a new angle, or in a fresh perspective, that is both suggestive and illuminating. In fact this survey of historical systems itself goes far to prove what the experienced reader had already suspected—that Mr. Joad's scathing contempt for "apriori" Ethics is largely pose, betraying the effect upon his own thought of the present willingness among self-styled ultra-moderns to swallow whole the sub-conscious, psychoanalysis, the vital urge, creative impulse, and what-not, while totally rejecting classical philosophy as theoretical and apriori.
The constructive part of Mr. Joad's book is itself an ironical commentary upon his introduction; for his own "common-sense Ethics" proves to be interesting not as a summary of facts culled from the observation of life but as an application of certain conceptions themselves highly theoretical, to the field of human conduct. Chief of these is that of Impulse, a term supremely important in the author's account because it enables him to cor- relate such conceptions as the Life-Force which he takes from Bergson and Shaw, with the facts and assumptions of Psycho-analysis. Impulse, he asserts, is the dynamic element in human life, the principle of growth, the source of change and progress. It is a tendency or urge to action springing from the depths of our nature and conditioned by no consciousness of end or result. It is in fact an unconscious desire: we are conscious of
