to show at some length that our special need is a new science, 'ethology,' or the science of the formation of character. This is to be a deductive science, "a system of corollaries from psychology, the experimental science," and it is to form the necessary connecting link between psychology, on the one hand, and sociology, on the other, the latter also being of necessity a deductive science. The precise relation between 'ethology' and ethics is not explained; but apparently the former would stand to the latter something as physiology to hygiene. Mill presumably would say: we must have a scientific understanding of what is, in the formation of character, before we indulge in speculations regarding what ought to be.
Now our intelligent student, after being duly impressed with the all-importance of a 'method' applied to ethics, analogous to the method employed in the case of the physical sciences, will be puzzled to find that in the Utilitarianism, where he would rightly assume that one must look for the most complete statement of Mill's mature views on ethics, all discussion regarding the 'freedom of the will' is tacitly omitted, and not the slightest mention is made of even the possibility of such a science as 'ethology.' Mill simply discusses the problem of the Summum Bonum on its own merits, as moralists had done before and have done since. The fact apparently is: Mill had simply changed his mind. We know that he had been ambitious to write a book on sociology, considered as a deductive science; but that, failing utterly with the proposed deductive science of 'ethology,' which was to connect sociology with psychology, he found himself compelled to give up this plan. Under the circumstances, it was natural that he should tacitly drop his rather exorbitant claims for 'scientific method, ' as applied to ethics, and treat the science as he could, and not as, from purely abstract considerations, he conceived that one should.
If Dr. Douglas had been writing for advanced students, he doubtless would have explained all this, making his introductions largely historical,—the only possible satisfactory treatment, one must add, for Mill's always interesting, but frequently shifting, ethical point of view. As it is, the introductory essays seem to me only calculated to increase the student's perplexity. For instance, the second paragraph of the first essay contains this passage: "It was his [Mill's] interest in the logic of ethics which chiefly brought about his rejection of the unsystematic views of morality which were prevalent in his day. It was this interest, too, which first made him sensible of the importance of Bentham's work as a moralist, and which afterwards served to maintain Bentham's influence over his mind, in spite of many changes in
