History as past ethics; an introduction to the history of morals

by P. V. N. Myers

PREFACE

This work completes the series of historical textbooks which I began more than thirty years ago. It is an expansion of a course of lectures given for several years to my advanced classes in history, and is designed as a brief introduction to the history of morals. In treating the science of morals as a branch of history my thought is, without trenching in the least upon the domain of the philosophy of morals, to make the work of the department of history more helpfully introductory than it has hitherto been to that of the department of moral philosophy. The book is the outgrowth of a conviction that the philosophy of ethics, if it shall become a stimulus and guide to social service and humanitarian effort,—especially if it shall bring reënforcement to that ethical idealism which so largely motives the present-day movement for world peace,—must be based on a knowledge of the facts of the moral life of the race in all the various stages of the historic evolution, and that to gather and systematize these facts is a part of the task of the historian, indeed the most important part of his task. It is my hope that teachers of both history and ethics may find the book helpful, whether made the basis of classroom discussion or of lecture comment.

P. V. N. M.

College Hill
Cincinnati, Ohio

Ethics gives to History its rational goal; and all morality has the perfect shaping of universal history as its ultimate end. A real understanding of history is not possible without ethics; universal history is the realization of the moral ... within humanity.—Adolf Wuttke.

The real advance made by Thucydides consists, perhaps, in this, that he perceived the motive forces of human history to be in the moral constitution of human nature.—Leopold von Ranke.

Ethics, if it is to become truly a science, must shun the path of speculation and follow closely the historical method.... Range in fancy over the whole circle of the sciences, and you will find there no place for ethics save as a branch of human history.... Given the earliest morality of which we have any written record, to trace from it through progressive stages the morality of to-day; that is the problem, and the only problem which can fall to a truly scientific ethics.... Ethics as the comparative history of universal morality is the vestibule to the temple of moral philosophy.—Jacob Gould Schurman.