[9] T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 5th ed., p. 240.
[10] “We cannot explain morality without going to objective morality, which is expressed in the customs and laws, in the moral commands and judgments, conceptions and ideals of the race” (Frank Thilly, “Friedrich Paulsen’s Ethical Work and Influence,” The International Journal of Ethics for January, 1909, p. 150). And so Wundt: “The original source of ethical knowledge is the moral consciousness of man, as it finds objective expression in the universal perceptions of right and wrong, and further, in religious ideas and in customs. The most direct method for the discovery of ethical principles is, therefore, the anthropological method. We use this term in a wider sense than is customary, to include ethnic psychology, the history of primitive man and the history of civilization, as well as the natural history of mankind” (Ethics: the Facts of the Moral Life, tr. Gulliver and Titchener (1908), p. 19). Cf. also Westermarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), vol. i, pp. 158 ff.
[11] “An ideal is essential to the very existence of morality.”—George Harris, Moral Evolution (1896), p. 54.
[12] “The history of moral ideals and institutions, though hitherto ignored by moralists, seems to me the most important topic in the whole realm of ethics.”—Schurman, The Ethical Import of Darwinism (1887), p. 201.
[13] S. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress (1889), p. 354. The same thought is expressed by the writer of “The Natural History of Morals,” North British Review for December, 1867: “The earth is a moral graveyard ... and our virtues and vices will, in turn, be but fossils which the eye of science shall curiously scan, and they will finally crumble into dust, from which the moral harvests of the future shall spring.”
[14] Lecky, History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 154.
[15] “Effective ideals are elicited by circumstances. But they are not created by them. It is a prejudice of modern sociology, a prejudice which sociology has taken over from biology, to try to explain the inner by the outer.”—G. Lowes Dickinson, “Ideals and Facts,” Hibbert Journal for January, 1911, p. 266.
[16] “The growth of intellectuality, considered as breadth of view and competence of personal judgment, carries with it normally growth in sensitiveness of feeling and rightness of ethical attitude.”—Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretation in Mental Development (1897), p. 397.
[17] See [Chapter XVIII]. “The activity of a free people creates a great number of social relations from which arise new duties and new rights; so that liberty is not less favorable to the development of morality than to that of letters, arts, and sciences, of all the noble interests and high faculties of our nature.”—Denis, Histoire des théories et des idées morales dans l’antiquité (1879), t. i, p. 10.
[18] Principles of Economics, 2d ed., p. 1. “It is not Christianity but industrialism that has brought into the world that strong sense of the moral value of thrift, steady industry, punctuality in observing engagements, constant forethought with a view to providing for the contingencies of the future, which is now so characteristic of the moral type of the most civilized nations.”—Lecky, The Map of Life (1900), pp. 53 f.