THE AMERICAN

JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

VOLUME II NOVEMBER, I896 NUMBER 3

ABSTRACT AND PRACTICAL ETHICS.

THIS paper is meant as a reply to a criticismthat was recently
made in public on the method of the London Ethical Society
and kindred organizations. The method in question, so far as
I understand it, is to assist practice by popularizing, through
public lectures and printed papers, the best results of the sys-
tematic study of ethics. But now we are told that " these
results are 'abstract' and, as such, irrelevant to the problems
which the practical reformerhas to face. At a time when the
chief duty of the moralist, who is more than a mere student of
ethical theories, is to touch the conscience and stimulate to
active service in the cause of social justice, it is a species of
solemn triflingto invite people to academic discussions upon the
nature of the good and kindred topics." In opposition to this
view I wish to show that the method of studying moral and
social problems which we here aim at encouraging is not so far
removed from everyday life as might at firstbe supposed, and
that the kind of ideas for which we stand, so far from being
" abstract" in any sense that is opposed to practice, are the only
kind that are really practical.
I.
I shall begin with a definitionof our terms. What is meant
by "abstract" and "practical" ethics, respectively?
By abstract ethics would usually be meant the theoretic dis-
34'
342 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

cussion of the nature of human conduct and the elements of

human well-being. As an example of such a discussion we
might take the controversythat has raged fromthe beginning
among moralists as to whetherthe end is happiness or perfec-
tion. But this definitionwould not be sufficientto distinguish
" abstract" from any other kind of ethics. For all ethics is
abstract in this sense. It is a system of thoughts and judgments
and all thoughtsare abstract in the sense that they are "of " or
"about" an object; they are not the object itself.
But if we look closer we shall see that there is an intelligible
sense in which we may speak of an ethics which is abstract and
contrastit with an ethics which is not. For while ethics has to
do with thoughts or ideas, and all ideas are abstract, yet there
are abstractionswithinabstractions. Among ideas of an object
we inust recognize a distinction between the idea which is
abstract in the sense that it is one-sided and partial and the idea
which, by holding together differentsides or aspects of the
thing, aims at becoming concrete as the object itself is concrete.
In the sense first mentioned, thoughts or ideas are by their
nature abstract. It is no reproach to them that they are so. In
the latter sense of the term abstract, it is a radical defect of our
thoughts to remain abstract when they might be concrete.
If now with this distinction in mind we ask who is it who
thinksabstractly? we are apt to get an answerthat throwsa curi-
ous light on the antithesis with which we started,between the
abstract thinkerand the practical man. For we are apt to find
that the so-called practical and matter-of-fact people, instead of
being those who have the firmesthold upon the concrete in the
sense above defined,are just the people who are most likely to
become the victims of abstractions. People, on the other hand,
who are sometimes thought of as idealists and dreamers may be
just the people who are most likely to be free of them.
This, at any rate, was the conclusion at which the philoso-
pher Hegel arrived when in a well-knownpamphlet he addressed
himselfto this question. "Who " he asked, "Ithinksabstractly?"
And he answers "Not the man of culture, far less the philoso-
 ABSTRA CT AND PRACTICAL ETHICS 343

pher, but the uneducated and the so-called practical man." His
examples are so vivid and so aptly illustratewhat is here meant
by an abstract idea that I make no apology for quoting them.
A murdereris being dragged to execution. The multitude
see only the criminal in him and follow him with their curses.
Some fineladies remarkwhat a powerful,handsome, interesting
man he is. The bystandersare scandalized that anyone should
be so lost to proprietyas to find good looks in a murderer. A
priest who stands by and understands the heart explains that it
all comes of the corruptionof the upper classes. This illustrates
one abstraction. These people see only the murderer in the
prisoner. They take no account of his upbringing,the traitsof
character he has inherited,the previous harsh sentence forsome
trivial offencethat embitteredhim against society. But, besides
the common-sensepractical people among the crowd, there are
the idealists and sentimentalists. They see nothingof the mur-
derer in the unhappy man, but only the scapegoat of an unjust
society. They shout in his honor and would fain throwbouquets
on the cart that carries him. This illustrates the opposite
abstraction. These people see only what may be alleged in jus-
tificationof the individual. The outrage on social institutions
escapes them. Finally there is an old woman from the poor-
house who is overheard to say as the sunlight strikes upon the
prisoner: "See how sweetly God's gracious sunshine falls upon
poor Binder's head." She means it in allusion to the German
proverb that a worthless man does not deserve the sun. That
was the multitude'sview of Binder. God thought otherwiseand
the old woman recognizes it. She does not, like the sentimen-
talist,simply cancel his guilt. On the other hand, she does not
see in him merely the accursed murderer. He is going to pay-
perhaps rightly-the last penalty to human law, but in the judg-
ment passed by society upon him, society itselfis judged. This
is concretethinking. The differentsides or aspects of the event
have growntogether or coalescedin a higher and a truerview.
What we are called upon to notice in all this is that the
"abstract " idea is not the more remoteand difficultto reach, but
344 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the firstview that strikes us-which is necessarilysuperficialand

onesided. Its opposite is the concrete idea, which in turnis not
what first occurs to us, but is furtheraway and is only to be
reached by a gift of insight,as in the case of the old woman, or
as in the case of most of us by a strenuouseffortof comprehen-
sive thought. Employed as descriptions of differentspecies of
ethics we shall call that kind abstract which is in such a
hurryto be practical that it turnsin distaste from the labor of
impartial thinking,-and is content with seeing human life in a
light which may be as narrowand one-sided as you please, so
long as it affordsjustificationfor energeticaction. That ethics,
on the other hand, is concrete which is determined at all costs
to understand before it undertakes and is content to postpone
practical results in favor of a clear and comprehensiveview of
the end that it is sought to attain. It remains to be shown that
the latter kind instead of being hostile to practice is really, and
in the long run, the more practical of the two.
But before attempting to show this, let us ask, secondly,
in what sense we are to take the word "practical." What is
meant by "practical ethics ?" The sense that is in the mind of
our critic is clear. Practical ethics are ethics which lay down
some practical end as a moral duty and exhort to its pursuit.
But this overlooks the fact that such ends may be practical
in a twofold sense. They may be practical in the sense that
they are proposed as aims of conduct. In this sense any
idea may be practical. Any idea may be made a motive of
action. I have an idea of a world in which everyone is
rich and happy, and this idea may become practical in being
made an end of action. But clearly amongst such ends there
will be a differencebetween those that are really practical and
those which are not, between those that we are justifiedin believ-
ing will be realized and those which never can be. However
active and enthusiastica man might be in pursuit of the latter
kind, it would requirea stretchof language to call him a practical
man. The conclusion is that by practical ethics we ought to
mean not simplythe ethicswhichexhortsto practice,but the ethics
 ABSTRACT AND PRACTICAL ETHICS 345

which sets beforeus as worthyends ideas whichare reallypractical

in the sense that they are in harmonywith the moral aspirations
of mankind at large, and must sooner or later be realized in the
actual relationsof human society. How are we to describe such
ideas in terms of the distinction already drawn? Are they
abstract or are they concrete ? If the kind we called abstract
are the kind that are really practical, then the man who wishes
to be practical will do well to suspect the gifts of the ethical
society. If, on the other hand, I can succeed in showing that to
be practical we must be concrete, I shall have established a pre-
sumption in favor of their utility. Let us see.

II.
There is undoubtedly a common prejudice that the ideas that
can be realized in practice must be of the kind I have called
abstract. We cannot drive six abreast throughTemple Bar and
we cannot get everythingthat we wish. We must cut our coat
according to our cloth and the cloth is never enough for the pat-
tern we should like to cut. It is in the nature of things that we
should be content with partial success. Practice is made up of
compromises,and blessed is the man who does not expect too
much.
Now compromise is a large subject and I do not propose to
enteron it here. It is sufficient to point out that it is one thingto
accept the conditions underwhich our ideal of what is best must
be realized, it is anotherto give up the hope of ever realizingit and
settling down contentedly to live from hand to mouth. The
formeris compromise in one sense. The Greeks would have
called it practical wisdom. The latteris compromisein another.
Modern politicians call it opportunism. The adnmissionthat in
practical policy we mustgo a step at a timeis thereforein no wise
inconsistentwith the contentionthat no noble and lasting work
was ever done except under the inspirationof some distant and
for the presentunrealizable idea. And such an ideal, if the work
is to be really noble and lasting, must be of the kind for which
I am contending: it must be a concrete ideal taking in all the
346 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

elements of the problem to be solved. Anythingelse, however

feasible at the time it may appear, must turnout in the end to
be impracticable. The forces of reality are leagued against it.
However favorable to it the circumstancesmay seem to be, there
is no sure footing for it in the actual world. With the concrete
idea all this is reversed. Let a man but have hold of such an
idea, the whole world may be against him; in the end it will
come round to him. As Emerson would have said, he has
hitched his chariot to a star. He may seemto fail. He may
die withoutseeing the fruitof his labor. But the idea lives and
he may rest in peace. In such an idea he has the substance of
things hoped for,the evidence of things not seen.
History will serve us best in illustration. It exhibits abstrac-
tions ona large scale. I take one or two almost at random. Every-
one is familiarwith the part played in the course of the French
Revolution by " abstract ideas." Issuing fromthe brain of that
prince of abstract thinkers,Jean Jacques Rousseau, they con-
trolled the whole movementand had a splendid chance. Founded
on the historical examples of Greece and Rome, preached with
all the eloquence of the greatest prose writerof his time, dom-
inating a great national uprising,accepted as the creed of the
party that finallytriumphed over the storm,here, if anywhere,
abstract ideas might be expected to succeed. And yet it might
with truthbe said that not one of Rousseau's positive proposals
succeeded in establishing itself as an actual institution.
Equally strikingis the example of the idea that dominated
the succeeding decade-the idea of a French Empire founded
on the ruins of national libertyin Europe. Every circumstance
seemed to combine to favorits realization. Yet the whole power
of the greatest military genius the world has ever seen was
insufficientto establish the Napoleonic abstraction in the face
of the forcesthat concretereality had at its disposal to oppose it.
These ideas failed because they did not correspond to the actual
wants of the time. They were not in the line of actual progress.
There was no place for them in the moral order thatwas then on
the point of establishing itselfamong the nations of Europe.
 ABSTRACT AND PRACTICAL ETHICS 347

If on the other hand you desire an example of the power

of a concrete idea, you may go to Professor Seeley's life
of Stein who was Napoleon's contemporary. From the very
firstthe great Prussian ministerwas in contact with reality. He
had conceived the idea of nationalityin all its depth and com-
plexity as the living moral force of the time. He was almost
alone among the leading men in Europe in his belief in it. Even
to Goethe with his magnificenthumanitarianismit seemed but a
thin abstraction. Everything was against it. The national
rising in Spain was a miserable failure. Austria showed no
response to it. Russia was cold. Yet Stein stuck doggedly to
it and in the long run, in spite of incredible discouragementand
opposition, so far succeeded in organizingthe national feeling in
Prussia as to prepare the way for the fall of Napoleon and lay
the foundationof the modern German Empire and modern Ger-
man civilization. Whether the evil influence of abstract ideas
may not be overruled and in the long run turned to good, as it
has been asserted that the despotism of Napoleon was turned to
good in that it roused the spirit of freedom in the nations of
Europe, is another question. To the individual,at any rate, and
especially to the individual who thirsts to be practical, it is. a
poor consolation to recognize that the good has triumphedand
the world got its way in spite of, or even because of,his effortsto
oppose it.
These illustrations are frompolitics. In ethics and philos-
ophy the autobiography of John Stuart Mill offersan histori-
cal illustration. Mill, it will be remembered,was brought up by
his fatherin the straitestsect of the pleasure philosophy. He
was trained fromhis youth up to look for all the law and the
prophets to the utilitarianschool, especially to its great founder
JeremyBentham. Bentham's contributionto ethics (as is well
known) was not his theorythat happiness is the end, but that
the happiness-givingproperties of objects and actions may be
reduced to scientific measurement and that the art of life con-
sists in the just appreciation of the pleasure value of objects of
desire. As a devout Benthamite,Mill sought to perfecthimself
348 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

in this art and to become a kind of professor of it. But the

more of an adept he became in this moral arithmetic,the further
he seemed to be from the promised happiness. Measuring all
objects of pursuitby theircapacity to give positive pleasure, the
interestin the objects themselves seemed to evaporate and life
to appear sordid and empty. He has described the period of
moral depression which supervened upon this discovery in one
of the most interestingpassages in philosophical biography. He
only finallysucceeded in escaping from it by casting aside the
pleasure-calculus as a guide to happiness, and throwinghimself
into the concrete interestsof life. He explained his experience
as an instance of what he called the paradox of Hedonism: the
paradox, namely,that to obtain happiness you must cease to aim
at it as an end, "to get it you must forgetit." The explanation
sufficedto save the credit of the school among the followersof
Mill, but it could not be expected that it would satisfy anyone
else. The true explanation, of course, is that pleasure is only
one element in well-being,and only by a confusioncould be mis-
taken for the whole of it. The idea that it was the whole was
an abstract idea in the sense for which I have contended and it
revealed its abstractness the moment that a consistent attempt
was made to apply it to practice, by refusingto work at all.
The bearing of these examples on the present argumentis
plain. If in order to be practical in the best sense ideas must
be concrete,and if concrete ideas cannot, as a rule,be had with-
out serious intellectual effort,there is at least a presumptionin
favor of an institutionone of whose professed objects is to offer
a hand to anyone who is willing to make the effortrequired.

III.
I have tried to establish a general presumption in favor of
the " abstract" study of ethics. But this is not all that may be
said: it may be pleaded also that rising out of the special
character of the time in which we live there is at present a
special need for such a study.
Our age, we are often told, is an age of transition. This
 ABSTRACT AND PRACTICAL ETHICS 349

means among other things that on many subjects that concern

the life and destiny of human beings, we no longer stand where
we used to. The old maxims and the old authoritiesthat existed
to enforce them no longer sufficeus. New ideas of individual
life are opening up to us, new types of character appeal to us.
The center of authorityhas shiftedfrom the pulpit to the press.
And what is true of individual is still more obviously true of
social life. For a centuryor more we have ceased to see any
special sacredness in established formsof governmentor indeed
in any of the fixed forms of social or industriallife. Prescrip-
tion is no defence. Every one of them is called upon to submit
itself to the test of reason and experience. By its utilityit
must stand or fall.
The consequence of all this is that people who are in earnest
about individual or public duty are beset by perplexities that
did not trouble an earlier generation. They have lost faithin
the precedents and authoritiesto which it would have appealed
with the result that they are thrown upon their own private
judgment in many mattersthat would have been settled for them
in another age. Under these circumstances it need hardly be
said that there is danger of mistake where formerlythere was
none. What precisely the danger is and whence it arises is a
more difficultquestion. The answer will bring us to our point.
We shall prepare the way for it if we consider for a moment the
nature and origin of the formswe are leaving behind us and the
kind of service they performedfor our ancestors.
Take first the religious formuke of the ages of faith.
With all their cruditythese continue to impressus with the rich-
ness and many-sidedness of their contents. And this becomes
comprehensiblewhen we remember that these formsobtained
their hold upon mankindbecause they representedmany streams
of thought and aspiration. The theological doctrines we find
epitomized in our articles of religion and confessions of faith
were the issue of an earnest attempton the part of their framers
to grasp the meaning of lifein all its manifoldrelations. It was
only natural,accordingly, that so long as they were acquiesced
3 50 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

in they should exercise a double influenceover human thought.

In some respects undoubtedly theywere repressive. This is the
side of them that is now commonlyemphasized. But in another
respect they were expansive and in the strictestsense educative.
To understandthem called for an effortin the believer- too
great an effortas we now think,considering the amount of truth
that they contained, yet an effortwhich had its reward in a
dignifiedand comprehensive view of human nature.' Similarly
the catechisms professed to expound the whole duty of man and
present us with an ideal of character which we must admit was
conceived with extraordinarybreadth and insight.
What is true of moral and religious formulaeis true also of
the older formsof social, industrial,and political organization.
They did not, of course, leave room for wants that are of recent
development,but so far as they went they representedin broad
outline the organic requirements of human life. In the times
when they are generally accepted there was not much danger
that essential elements in human nature should fail to have jus-
tice done them.
But they are no longer accepted. We have outgrown the
formsthat have hitherto served us. New needs have devel-
oped. New classes claim to share the provision that was made
for the old ones. The younger generation is knocking at the
door. Here and there it is ready to pull down the house if
admission be refused it. All this lays a new obligation upon
those whose special duty it is as leaders of opinion to recognize
those new demands and to point out how they are to be satis-
fied consistently with the maintenance of the conditions of
order and progress in human society. Such persons are called
to a new task which can only be adequately performed on the
basis of a comprehensive review of the elements of the prob-
lem, involving nothing short of the attemptto reconstructin
thought the whole scheme of social life, and to justifyto the
IThis was whatled F. D. Maurice into his paradoxical defenceof the Thirty-nine
Articlesas "guiding the studentof humanityand divinityintoa pathwayof truth, and
pointingout to himthe differentformsof truth"-Life, Vol. I, p. 524.
 ABSTRACT AND PRACTICAL ETHICS 3 5I

reason forms and institutions that have hitherto rested on

instinctor interest. This, it will be admitted, is a hard enough
task under any circumstances. But the difficultyis greatly
increased under the circumstancesof pressing practical need, in
which, as we have seen, it has to be attempted.
It is precisely here that the above-mentioned danger comes
in. The danger is lest in our haste to formulatethe new ethical
creeds and the new programmesof political reformwe overlook
fundamental elements in human nature and ignore organic
needs. Expressed in the terms this paper has tried to make
familiar,it is lest, overborne by the clamor of those who "know
in part and prophesy in part," we betray the trust we have
received fromthe time in which we live, and resign the call " to
see life steadily and see it whole."
That this danger is not an imaginary one is seen in the con-
flictof opinion that exists among would-be leaders on many of
the most fundamentalquestions of social life. Many of these
illustratewhat we mean by an abstraction in the fieldof politics,
and may be taken as typical of the leading forms of abstract
ideas in general.
First we have those who may be said to be abstract thinkers
because they see the whole withoutseeing the parts. An impor-
tant species under this class are the people who see the end
withoutseeing the means. As a rule they are people who have
a high ideal of what human life may be, but they are apt to
have little or no idea of how their ideal is to be realized. The
better type of anarchist is an extremeinstance here. The anar-
chist is a man who looks forwardto a time when the law of life
shall be the law of liberty,when the cumbrous apparatus of law,
with its class bias, its blunders, and its incitementsto crime,will
no longer exist, when no man shall say, "Know the Lord," for
all shall know him, and when force and compulsion shall be
things of the past. He is an extreme type, but to the same
brotherhoodbelong all those who, confiningthemselves to less
sudden and sweeping changes, set down all our troubles, moral
and social, to some single economic abomination or group of
352 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

abominations. They have the same ideal as the anarchist,it may

be, but it is not law and government themselves, but rent,or
interest,or profit,or all of themtogether under the general head
of the individual ownershipof capital, that is to blame. They are
the kind of people who stand as "independent" candidates and
go to make up independentparties. What theymay do or become
in the future,when they have got into touch with fact, it would
be vain to prophesy. In the meantime they strike one often as
impractical,and sometimes as worse. And the reason is that
they are abstract thinkersin the sense described. Their ideas
are not in touch with reality at any point at which force may be
profitablyexercised with a view to improving upon it in the
direction of their ideal. They have too great a contempt for
what actually exists to hold parley withit at any point. "Things
are all wrong." The whole established fabric of society is rot-
ten. There is not even a sound plank on which they can stand
to begin the task of setting it right,and so they are apt either
to fall back into the ranks of the unemployed politician, the
writer,and agitator and do nothing at all; or, if they set their
hand to what other people are doing, to be an incalculable and
unreliable element, the despair of their friendsand the derision
of their enemies.
Shakespeare, who knew everything,knew of this type and
the troublethey might be to themselvesand othersin the pursuit
of their ends.
"Fie on't,0 fie,"saysHamlet,"'tis an unweededgarden
Thatgrowsto seed; thingsrankandgrossinnature
Possessitmerely."
"The timeis outofjoint; 0 cursedspite
ThateverI wasbornto setitright."
A great deal has been writtenand said about the source of
Hamlet's ineffectiveness. Some have attributedit to his " native
irresolution," others to a deep-rooted pessimism, others to his
so-called madness. In this differenceof learned opinion,perhaps
I may be permittedto claim him as a case of an abstract thinker
of the kind I am speaking of. He has noble views of things in
 ABSTRA CT AND PRA CTICAL ETHICS 35 3

general, but is lamentablyout of touch with the particular. It

is not that he has been at college too long and has thought too
much. He has really left it too soon and has thought too
little. A little thought,like a little knowledge, is a dangerous
thing. With Hamlet the consequence is that he halts and
hesitates in action, and when he does act seems to abandon
himselfto the impulse of the moment and to be the victim of
mere caprice. And so, instead of setting anything right,he
sets everythingwrong.
The moral is that our duty to the world is never to set every-
thing right, for things are never all wrong. If they were, it
would be a hopeless task to set about improvement in any
form. Mr. Punch has made us laugh at the anarchist who
appeals to the British policeman when he has got himself into
trouble, but the caricature contains the profounder suggestion
that it is, afterall, to the statusquo that the revolutionist must
appeal as the foundationfor the state of things which he hopes
to establish. It is not only that he relies on human nature as it
now is-itself the product of the old order-as the root from
which the new order is to spring,but he uses present laws and
institutions,a free press and public platforms,posts and rail-
ways, parliamentsand policemen, as the means of propagating
the knowledge of it and preparing the way for its acceptance.
This criticismis not, of course, meant to justify obstructionor
indifferenceto progress. Though all can never be wrong-the
existence of even one faithfulsoul to recognize it as wrong or
to protest against it means that something, at least, is right
- yet there is always something wrong somewhere, which
each of us probably was born to set right. But the point to
notice is that it is always a very definitething, whether a
defect in our own character or a defect in our neighbor's
drains. When we examine it, moreover, we shall probably
find that it is not something wholly new which we are required
to do, but something in the line of what has been already
done, developing and extending to a new case a principle
already recognized.
354 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

A second type which is even commonerthan the man who

sees the whole without seeing the parts, the end withoutthe
means, is the man who contrariwise sees the part without
seeing the whole.
As an example of this abstraction, we may take the man
who sees one thing wrong here, another there,but has no clear
idea of what is right as a whole or of the direction in which
progress ought to move. He sees marks of social disease at
this point or at that, but has no articulate conception of what
social healthin the long run means. And so when he sets to
work upon a remedy he is apt to be like the doctor who treats
the symptomsinstead of the disease. As the formertype may
usually be known by their contempt for law and government,
the people I am now speaking of may usually be recognized by
their exaggerated faithin the mechanism of parliament. They
aim rather at altering the law than at altering the law-giver.
Mr. Herbert Spencer is in bad odor with the newer school of
philosophical radicals. He has been roundly and, as I think,
rightlydenounced on account of his abstract and doctrinaire
individualism. And yet there is this of truth at the bottom of
his denunciation of laws and law-givers,that hasty legislation
dealing with isolated evils is not unlikely in suppressing one
only to create another. Mr. Spencer draws the conclusion that
since we are so likely to do mischief by legislation we had
much better cease to legislate altogether. The argument does
not,of course,supportthis conclusion,but it is a forciblereminder
of the obligation politicians are under to make sure before
they proceed to legislate that they have as concrete a view as
possible of the purpose for which the new act is devised and the
circumstances under which it works.

IV.
One or two difficultiesraised by the above contentionremain
to be considered. After the example just quoted, it may sug-
gest itselfto some that my indictment is, after all, not against
these particular extremes of tendency alone, but against all
 ABSTRACT AND PRACTICAL ETHICS 355
party or sectional action whatsoever. For is not every party
and every opinion that has a name at all marked with the same
one-sidedness ? Do not all the names by which leading schools
of moralistsand reformersare known conceal such abstractions
as we have been speaking of ? Are not one set of abstractions
indicated by individualist, conservative, moderate, another by
socialist, liberal, progressive? One set by realist, utilitarian,
naturalist,another by idealist, mystic, supernaturalist? And if
this is so, will it not be safer for us to keep clear of them alto-
gether, and refuse to call ourselves by any of them?
The fact is undoubtedly true. These names strictly taken
do conceal abstractions. But it is to be noted that the defect
in question attaches not to names of schools of moralistsand
politicians alone, but to names of any kind. Logic, as we all
know, divides names into concrete names and abstract names,
but the truthis that all names are abstract. It is of the natureof
names to be abstract, for they all indicate only one side or
aspect of the thing they denote. If, therefore,we are going to
wait till we can finda name which will express everything we
are before we consent to call ourselves anything, we shall have
to be content to remain nameless. The one-sidedness of a name
is in reality no reason why we should refuse to call ourselves by
it, if we findourselves in general sympathywith the partywhich
adopts it. It is, on the other hand, a very good reason why we
should be on our guard against the one-sidedness of thought
which the name suggests. The penalty that attaches to the
neglect of this precaution illustrates a peculiar attribute of
abstractionswhich has often been pointed out. I have already
said that abstract ideas are impractical ideas. Circumstances
are sure to defeat them. But this is not all. It requires to be
added that they defeat themselves. For abstractions are a
kind of extreme and like extremes they tend to meet. It is
impossible for me at this stage in my paper to illustrate this
propertyof abstractions with any fullness. I may, however,in
passing referto a familiar example of it. We shall all admit
that there is such a thing as extreme individualism. One of the
356 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

marks of it is that it is chieflyeffectivein promoting socialism.

The extreme individualist stands in practice and theoryby the
rightsof propertyin the most exclusive sense. But the effect
of this on the general public is merely to underminethe respect
for property,on which all the so-called rightsmust ultimately
rest, and so to play into the hands of the socialist. And the
same is true in another way of extreme socialism. What is
more common than to see ardent socialists advocating as a cure
for starvation-wages communistic palliatives, which, if widely
applied, could only have the effect of weakening the general
movement in the direction of better pay, and so playing into
the hands of the individualist?
This paper will not have been addressed to an English audi-
ence if it has not suggested to some, as a finalobjection to the
contention it urges, that it is after all the merest common-
place. "You are only elaborating with a great deal of unneces-
sary flourishthe truismthat we must look at both sides of the
shield, and consider all questions that come before us from
every available point of view. In life and politics, especially,
we have to rememberthat we have to do with all sorts and con-
ditions of men, and with all varieties of taste. We must be
prepared, then, for a little of everything-a little realism and a
little idealism, a little socialism and a little individualism, a
touch of optimismto give dignityand a touch of pessimism and
of the devil to give a relish to our opinions. We are to go a
certain way with the advocates of all these doctrines, but ' not
too far."' Well, perhaps I do mean partly this, but I mean a
good deal more. For it is possible to look at both sides of the
shield withoutseeing them both as sides of the same shield, and
it is possible to see many aspects of a question and to see
how people might differupon it without seeing how the differ-
ent aspects complementone another in the whole that is broken
up between them. It is this comprehensive view forwhich I have
been puttingin a plea. In this view we not only see the various
sides, we unitethem. In order to do so we must not merely go
round and round, we must take our stand at the center. And
 ABSTRA CT AND PRA CTICAL ETHICS 3 57

this center in morals and politics, as I have tried to show, is

nothing else than human character itself.
In advocating the importanceof taking such a stand with a
view to effectivepractice, I must not, of course, be understood
to be requiring that all would-be reformersshould leave the
platformand the committeeroom and devote themselves to an
arduous course of moral philosophy. In reform,as elsewhere,
we must have division of labor; and those who are the best
thinkersmay likely enough be unfittedfor effectiveaction. My
contentionis that if they are it will be for other reasons than
the natureof their ideas, and that those whose professionit is to
carry ideas into practice will not be the worse but in every way
the better for possessing themselves by every means in their
power of the results of the best thinking on the subject of
the ends and ideals of human life.
Ethical societies aim, as I understand them, at bringing
these results withinthe reach of busy people so that he who
runs may read. In pursuing this aim they may require to have
recourse to propositions of a high degree of generality-if you
like, of abstractness. In this respect theirteaching will be color-
less and forbidding. "Philosophy," says Hegel, "paints her grey
in grey," and this is not less true of ethical philosophy than of
philosophy in general. But in statingits formulxand calling upon
thinkingpeople to understandthem,ethics is not forsakingreality
and losing touch withpractice. On the contrary,its most recent
formulx represent the attempt to rise above the half-truthsof
currentreflection,to embrace more of reality,and so by setting
man's life in a truerperspective to give it greater significance.
So far fromits being a matter of indifferenceto practice with
what ideas we approach the problems of individual and social
life, it is this that makes all the difference. " Conception,
says Walter Pater, "fundamental brain-work-that is what
makes all the differencein art." And what is true of the fine
arts is, I venture to think,equally true of that finestof all the
arts, the art of life. J. H. MUIRHEAD.
LONDON, ENGLAND.