Ethical Sentence Examples

The correspondence took an ethical tone.

The struggle between ethical religion and the current worship became acute toward the end of the 7th century.

This portion of the ethical theory does curious service in Kant's doctrine of religion.

Fichte, in short, advocates an ethical theism, and his arguments might easily be turned to account by the apologist of Christianity.

It was this definite basis of ethical Mosaic religion to which the prophets of the 8th century appealed, and apart from which their denunciations become meaningless.

And there was the positive ethical element in Kant's theism.

Antisthenes was a pupil of Socrates, from whom he imbibed the fundamental ethical precept that virtue, not pleasure, is the end of existence.

Their interest is in the ethical training of the individual on earth.

His ethical appeal is constant and stimulating."

The ultimate triumph of the good spirit is an ethical demand of the religious consciousness and the quintessence of Zoroaster's religion.

Ormazd is light and life, and creates all that is pure and good - in the ethical world of law, order and truth.

He is not alone in his doings and conflicts, but has in conjunction with himself a number of genii - for the most part personifications of ethical ideas.

Further, it is increasingly felt that ethical judgments do not depend on reason alone, but involve every element in our character; and that the real problem of practical morality is to establish a harmonious balance between the intelligence and the feelings - to make a man's "I think this is right" correspond with his "I feel that it is so."

Thus it might be argued that there can be no logical combination of elements from Christian ethics, with its divine sanction, and purely intuitional or evolutionary ethical theories, where the sanction is essentially different in quality.

The book appears to teach individual ethical immortality, though its treatment of the subject is somewhat vague.

The ethical standard of the book is high except in the bitterness displayed towards the "wicked," that is, the enemies of the Jews.

Though the intellectual world of the sages is different from that of the prophetic and legal Hebraism, they do not break with the fundamental Jewish theistic and ethical creeds.

With the establishment of the belief in ethical immortality this phase of scepticism vanished from the Jewish world, not, however, without leaving behind it works of enduring value.

It is popularly used of a relation between persons amounting to more than goodwill or friendship. By ethical writers the word has been used generally of distinct states of feeling, both lasting and spasmodic; some contrast it with "passion" as being free from the distinctively sensual element.

In this narrower sense the word has played a great part in ethical systems, which have spoken of the social or parental "affections" as in some sense a part of moral obligation.

This kingdom was to be gradually realized on earth, the transformation of physical nature gcing hand in hand with the ethical transformation of man.

The first (i.-vi.) contains a body of ethical instruction which is.

John Hetenyi and Gustavus Szontagh must be rather regarded as adopters and developers of the ethical teaching of Samuel Koteles in the previous period.

After the turn of the century, however, a new generation arose both among Croats and Serbs, which had received its education abroad, and especially in Prague, where the ethical and political teachings of Prof. Masaryk exercised a remarkable influence over the progressive youth of all Slav countries.

This law has important ethical and political bearings; but in the province of disease this advance of what may be compared to the interlocking of points and signals has had wide influence not only in altering our conceptions of disease, but also in enlarging our views of all perturbations of function.

The various title-words of the several articles are often the merest stalkinghorses, under cover of which to shoot at the Bible or the church, the target being now and then shifted to the political institutions of the writer's country, his personal foes, &c., and the whole being largely seasoned with that acute, rather superficial, common-sense, but also commonplace, ethical and social criticism which the 18th century called philosophy.

The end of ethical endeavour is the conclusion that all endeavour is vain and illogical.

Besides Truth, and the book Of the Gods which caused his condemnation at Athens, Diogenes Laertius attributes to him treatises on political, ethical, educational and rhetorical subjects.

The instruction prescribed by the Didache is very largely ethical, and stands in striking contrast to the more elaborate doctrinal teaching which came into vogue in later days.

The full contents of his dogmatic and ethical teaching we cannot gather from the Gallas.

The two parts are distinguished by difference of style; the Hebrew principle of parallelism of clauses is employed far more in the first than in the second, which has a number of plain prose passages, and is also rich in uncommon compound terms. In view of these differences there is ground for holding that the second part is a separate production which has been united with the first by an editor, an historical haggadic sketch, a midrash, full of imaginative additions to the Biblical narrative, and enlivened by many striking ethical reflections.

For this reason their interest in ethical speculations was all the keener; their great thinkers were endlessly engaged in settling what the relation ought to be between duty and self-interest.

Realism, more particularly of the Wundt type, is represented by Emericus Pauer, Az ethikai determinismus (" Ethical Determinism "), and Eugen Posch (Az idorb'l, " On Time ").

He was quite unacquainted with the history of his own language and literature, and more here than anywhere else he showed the extraordinarily limited and conventional spirit which accompanied the revolt of the French 18th century against limits and conventions in theological, ethical and political matters.

The peculiar charm which this Gospel has been generally felt to possess is largely due to the spiritual and ethical traits which have been noted.

Ferguson was led to undertake this work from a conviction that the history of the Romans during the period of their greatness was a practical illustration of those ethical and political doctrines which were the object of his special study.

In his ethical system Ferguson treats man throughout as a social being, and illustrates his doctrines by political examples.

The ethical character of the book is of the highest type, and its profound influence on the writers of the New Testament is yet to be appreciated.

Noteworthy features of his preaching were its original and prophetic character, and its high ethical tone, as shown e.g.

In the Principles of Ethics Spencer, though relying mainly on the objective order of nature and the intrinsic consequences of actions for the guidance of conduct, conceives the ethical end in a manner intermediate between the hedonist and the evolutionist.

In this reasoning Spencer appears to have overlooked the possibility of an expansion of the ethical environment.

But no substantial philosophy of any kind emerged from humanism; the political lucubrations of the scholars were, like their ethical treatises, for the most part rhetorical.

It was the existing ceremonial observance divorced from the ethical piety that they denounced.

When the first storm of opposition from smaller men had begun to die down, thinkers of real weight, beginning with Cumberland and Cudworth, were moved by their aversion to his analysis of the moral nature of man to probe anew the question of the natural springs and the rational grounds of human action; and thus it may be said that Hobbes gave the first impulse to the whole of that movement of ethical speculation that, in modern times, has been carried on with such remarkable continuity in England.

Ethical issues are covered explicitly in some taught modules, and they are reinforced when students consider their honors research project.

The ethical treatises of the scholars are deficient in substance, while Ficino's attempt to revive Platonism betrays an uncritical conception of his master's drift.

Not obedience to a moral law, but realization in ourselves of the divine life is the true ethical end.

He further wrote an ethical treatise and was the author of various translations.

After the middle of the 4th century it was regarded as essential that the candidate for baptism should not only be acquainted with the spiritual truths and ethical demands which form the basis of practical Christianity, but should also be trained in theology and the interpretation of the creeds.

Moreover, the definitely ethical character of the religion of Yahweh established by Moses is exhibited in the strict exclusion of all sexual impurity in His worship. Unlike the Canaanite Baal, Yahweh hasnofemale consort, and this remained throughouta distinguishing trait of the original and unadulterated Hebrew religion (see Bathgen, Beitreige, p. 265).

He represents the old ethical Mosaism, which had not disappeared from the national consciousness, but still remained as the moral pre-supposition on which the prophets of the following century based their appeals and denunciations.

Where it is possible to make legitimate and unambiguous comparisons, the ethical and spiritual superiority of Old Testament thought has been convincingly demonstrated, and to the re-shaping and re-writing of the older history and the older traditions the Old Testament owes its permanent value.

The change from Palestinian polytheism to the pre-eminence of Yahweh and the gradual development of ethical monotheism are facts which external evidence continues to emphasize, which biblical criticism must investigate as completely as possible.

Apollonius of Tyana and the so-called Neopythagoreans drew similar ethical consequences from their eclectic study of Plato.

Ethical endeavour consists in the repudiation of the sensible; material existence is itself estrangement from God.

The Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man appeared in 1785, and their ethical complement, the Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, in 1788.

That is, it is possible to conceive of an ethical science which would extend considerably our knowledge of economic affairs, but no important new principle or original discovery, relevant to economic investigation, has come from that quarter in recent years, and at present ethics has more to learn from economics than the latter has from ethics.

Had Wagner been a man of more urbane literary intellect he might have been less ambitious of expressing a world-philosophy in music-drama; and it is just conceivable that the result might have been a less intermittent dramatic movement in his later works, and a balance of ethical ideas at once more subtle and more orthodox.

This ethical teaching, which is indefinitely higher and purer than that of the Old Testament, is yet its true spiritual child, and helps to bridge the chasm that divides the ethics of the Old and New Testaments."

The "ethical complement" of monophysitism is monothelitism (see Monothelites).

Micah resembles Amos, both in his country origin, and in his general character, which expresses itself in strong emphasis on the ethical side of religion.

We may, alternatively, describe Martineau's religion as his applied philosophy or his philosophy as his explicated religion, and both as the expression of his singularly fine ethical and reverent nature.

The theological and philosophical discussions which thus appeared he later described as " the tentatives which gradually prepared the way for the more systematic expositions of the Types of Ethical i They stand as Lectures ii., v., vi., xi., xii.

Shaftesbury's philosophical importance (see Ethics) is due mainly to his ethical speculations, in which his motive was primarily the ref utaticn of Hobbes's egoistic doctrine.

In political philosophy he teaches an ethical communism, and attacks the Darwinian principle of struggle for existence.

Canon is concerned) of that theory of which examples recur in Judges, Samuel and Kings, and this treatment of history in accordance with religious or ethical doctrines finds its continuation in the didactic aims which characterize the later non-canonical writings (cf.

There is no evidence that their religious or ethical ideals differed in any marked degree from those of the more serious-minded among their countrymen, for the emphasis which they laid upon the need of righteousness was not at all uncommon.

To all who felt this need Christianity offered high moral ideals, and a tremendous moral enthusiasm, in its devotion to a beloved leader, in its emphasis upon the ethical possibilities of the meanest, and in its faith in a future life of blessedness for the righteous.

If he attend not to the justice of his land, Ea, the king of fates, shall distort his lot, &c.'" Further illustrations of ethical teaching may be found in the litany or confession of a penitent cited by Mr Johns in the same paper (p. 303).

Arguing that ethical judgment is an act of discrimination, he endeavours to invalidate the doctrine of the moral sense (see Shaftesbury and Hutcheson).

All those whose ethical theory is in any degree hedonistic are to some extent the intellectual descendants of Epicurus (see Hedonism).

In general it is the simple homely virtues that are enjoined on men in Proverbs - there is no mention of courage, fortitude, intellectual truthfulness, and no recognition of beauty as an element of life; the ethical type is Semitic, not Hellenic, and the sages emphasize only those qualities that seemed to them to be most effective in the struggle of life; their insistence on the practical, not the heroic, side of character is perhaps in part the consequence of the position of the Jewish people at that time, as also the silence respecting international ethics belongs to the thought of the times.

His ethical theory of "fitness" (see Ell-Tics) is formulated on the analogy of mathematics.

Thus Christianity, as religion, is on the one hand the adoration of God, that is, of the highest and noblest, and this highest and noblest as conceived not under forms of power or knowledge but in the form of ethical self-devotion as embodied in Jesus Christ, and on the other hand it meets the requirements of all religion in its dependence, not indeed upon some absolute idea or omnipotent power, but in the belief that that which appeals to the soul as worthy of supreme worship is also that in which the soul may trust, and which shall deliver it from sin and fear and death.

In the absence of other competing interests his religious beliefs and duties occupy a much larger share of his attention than the votaries of many higher faiths bestow on theirs; and though his ethical range may be very limited, yet the total influence of his religion in determining for him what he may do and what he may not, brings the greater part of conduct under its control.

On the other hand, the ethical optimism of Shaftesbury, rather broadly impressive than exactly reasoned, and connected as it was with a natural theology that implied the Christian scheme to be superfluous, challenged attack equally from orthodox divines and from cynical freethinkers.

What I 've just found out is that someone who came with me from Earth has been put in an ethical quandary.

It also has interesting ramifications in ethical terms that relate strongly to the concept of ' trust '.

This is a safety net required by the state to ensure that you run a responsible and ethical business in the state.

Over the last 5 years this government 's much proclaimed ethical foreign policy has been exposed for the cynical sham that it always was.

Who would have thought the guardians of Robin Cook 's ethical foreign policy would have become the standard-bearers for an illegal war in Iraq?

But whatever the tensions between Blair and Cook, the Prime Minister was inexorably drawn into Cook 's new ethical statesmanship.

The Stem Cells & Our Lives sections looks at some of the ethical issues surrounding stem cell research.

Corporate and business banking analysis The bank 's Ethical Policy stipulates who the bank will and will not finance, as directed by customers.

Of hand you can see i am always department 's ethical strictures.

For example, gene flow might be avoided by making GM crops sterile, but ' terminator ' technology has gained an ethical stigma.

Having thus disposed of the ideas of truth and causality, he proceeds to undermine the ethical criterion, and denies that any man can aim at Good, Pleasure or Happiness as an absolute, concrete ideal.

The work is highly imaginative and often grotesque, but it is pervaded by an unusually high ethical enthusiasm.

As the last of the four great prophets of the 8th century he undoubtedly contributed to that religious and ethical reformation whose literary monument is the Book of Deuteronomy.2 The remainder of the book bearing the name of Micah falls into two main divisions, viz.

Adoption, for example, as a practice for improving the happiness of families and the welfare of society, is capable of being weighed, and can in truth only be weighed, by utilitarian considerations, and has been commended 1 For Comte's place in the history of ethical theory see Ethics.

He had the imagination that invested with personal being and ethical qualities the most abstruse notions.

In the first of these books his nomenclature is unfortunate; his division of ethical theories into the " unpsychological," " idiopsychological," and the " hetero-psychological," is incapable of historical justification; his exposition of single ethical systems is, though always interesting and suggestive, often arbitrary and inadequate, being governed by dialectical exigencies rather than historical order and perspective.

Korea, however, had neither a literary nor an ethical message to deliver, and thus her script failed to attract much attention.

Brief mention must also be made of two other kinds of books belonging to this epoch; namely, the Shingakusho (ethical essays) and the .Jilsuroku-mono (true records).

Although Rome wanted creative force to add a great series of tragic dramas to the literature of the world, yet the spirit of elevation and moral authority breathed into tragedy by Ennius passed into the ethical and didactic writings and the oratory of a later time.

In prose the old forms - oratory, history, the epistle, treatises or dialogues on ethical and literary questions - continue to be cultivated.

It is obvious that the state religion has a less direct connexion with morality and the religious sense than the worship of the household, but it has its ethical value in a sense of discipline and a consecration of the spirit of patriotism.

While most of the "Broad Churchmen" were influenced by ethical and emotional considerations in their repudiation of the dogma of everlasting torment, he was swayed by purely intellectual and theological arguments, and in questions of a more general liberty he often opposed the proposed Liberal theologians, though he as often took their side if he saw them hard pressed.

The morality of the Jews did not outgrow their religion, but their interest was always ethical and not speculative.

His ethical system was reproduced, though in a more precise and philosophical form, by Hutcheson, and from him descended, with certain variations, to Hume and Adam Smith.

Here, in 1740, he wrote his popular religious manual the Path of the Upright (Messilath Yesharim) and other ethical works.

Yet besides the particular contribution that Aristotle made to idealistic philosophy in his logical and ethical interpretations, he advanced the case in two directions.

His ascetic tendencies are exhibited in the Moralia and Regulae, ethical manuals for use in the world and the cloister respectively.

Maximus was not only a leader in the Monothelite struggle but a mystic who zealously followed and advocated the system of Pseudo-Dionysius, while adding to it an ethical element in the conception of.

The fragments of Pacuvius quoted by Cicero in illustration or enforcement of his own ethical teaching appeal, by the fortitude, dignity, and magnanimity of the sentiment expressed in them, to what was noblest in the Roman temperament.

Among the passages quoted from Pacuvius are several which indicate a taste both for physical and ethical speculation, and others which expose the pretensions of religious imposture.

Beneath his fun-making we can discern a man who is fundamentally serious, and whose ethical standards are ever lofty.

The predisposing circumstances which affected Montaigne were thus likely to incline him to scepticism, to ethical musings on the vanity of life and the like.

A certain amount of scepticism prevails among the educated classes, and political motives may ' contribute to their apparent orthodoxy, but there is no open dissent from Buddhism, and those who discard its dogmas still, as a rule, venerate it as an ethical system.

Enriched by new ethical and religious elements, Czech philosophy manifests itself in Masaryk's works as a new realism or humanism.

The third and fourth books, like the larger part of the second, treat of ethics; the third, of virtues and vices, in pairs; the fourth, of more general ethical and political subjects, frequently citing extracts to illustrate the pros and cons of a question in two successive chapters.

But law may mean ethical rule, and the Antinomians so understood it, and interpreted Luther's declaration to mean that believers are not under the dominion of the moral law.

It was answered that sin had not totally destroyed man's ethical nature, and that grace changed what was morally insensitive into what was morally sensitive, so that there could be a cooperation between God's grace and man's will.

Yet in modern times it has found expression in many ethical and literary works, and it is common also in other ancient non-Hellenic literature.

Albertus is frequently mentioned by Dante, who made his doctrine of free-will the basis of his ethical system.

Aristotle, as usual, adopted "eudaemonia" as the term which in popular language most nearly represented his idea and made it the keyword of his ethical doctrine.

Among modern writers, James Seth (Ethical Princ., 1894) resumes Aristotle's position, and places Eudaemonism as the mean between the Ethics of Sensibility (hedonism) and the Ethics of Rationality, each of which overlooks the complex character of human life.

Other Gentile converts would require instruction in the very rudiments of ethical and monotheistic religion.

It fed itself, not upon the laws, but upon the narrative, the prophetical and the poetical writings of the Old Testament, and it had a more spiritual and ethical tone than the Halaka.

So far then, Midrash tends to include moralizing history, whether we call it narrative or romance, attached to names and events, and it is obviously exemplified whenever there are unmistakable signs of untrustworthy amplification and of some explicit religious or ethical aim colouring the narrative.

He fell under the ban of Nero owing to his ethical teachings, and was exiled to the island of Gyarus on a trumped-up charge of participation in Piso's conspiracy.

And this it knows, not by a mere ethical judgment on the visible state of society, but because it has read Yahweh's secret written in the signs of the times and knows that He has condemned His people.

Thus it was that, though beyond question there had been a real advance in the average ethical and spiritual ideas of the people since the time of Isaiah, Jeremiah found himself more isolated than Isaiah had ever been.

But these teachers did not succeed in accomplishing a task parallel to what the Hebrew prophets achieved, namely, the complete renewal and elevation of the Hebrew religion from a local and national into a universal and ethical religion.

But, from the religious and moral point of view, it must be admitted that the ethical " mood " which Neoplatonism endeavoured to create and maintain is the highest and purest ever reached by antiquity.

It might seem, indeed, that Stoicism indicates a falling off from Plato and Aristotle towards materialism, but the ethical dualism, which was the ruling tendency of the Stoa, could not long endure its materialistic physics, and took refuge in the metaphysical dualism of the Platonists.

Yet the influence of Neoplatonism on the history of our ethical culture is immeasurable, above all because it begot the consciousness that the only blessedness which can satisfy the heart must be sought higher even than the sphere of reason.

In ethical precepts, in directions for right living (that is, asceticism), the two systems approximate more and more closely.

After the publication of this work his ethical doctrines occupied less space in his lectures, and a larger development was given to the subjects of jurisprudence and political economy.

With Goethe, who viewed with interest and appreciation the poetical fashion of treating fact characteristic of the Naturphilosophie, he continued on excellent terms, while on the other hand he was repelled by Schiller's less expansive disposition, and failed altogether to understand the lofty ethical idealism that animated his work.

Seth, Ethical Principles (3rd ed., 1898); other works quoted under Ethics.

But this effect of participation in the bread and cup was not in Paul's opinion automatic, was no mere o, ', us operatum; it depended on the ethical co-operation of the believer, who must not eat and drink unworthily, that is, after refusing to share his meats with the poorer brethren, or with any other guilt in his soul.

The physical and the ethical are not distinguished, and in this respect the character of the system is thoroughly materialistic; for when Mani co-ordinates good with light, and evil with darkness, this is no mere figure of speech, but light is actually good and darkness evil.

This contradiction presents itself to his mind primarily as elemental, and only in the second instance as ethical, inasmuch as he considers the sensual nature of man to be the outflow of the evil elements in nature.

This presentation of it as an ethical system of universal import was the joint work of Paul and Marcion.

After his master's death, in the third period of his own life, and during his connexion with Alexander, but before the final construction of his philosophy into a system, he was tending to write more and more in the didactic style; to separate from dialectic, not only metaphysics, but also politics, rhetoric and poetry; to admit by the side of philosophy the arts of persuasive language; to think it part of their legitimate work to rouse the passions; and in all these ways to depart from the ascetic rigidity of the philosophy of Plato, so as to prepare for the tolerant spirit of his own, and especially for his ethical doctrine that virtue consists not in suppressing but in moderating almost all human passions.

In the hands of Baha the aims of the sect became much more practical and ethical, and the wilder pantheistic tendencies and metaphysical hair-splittings of the early Balls almost disappeared.

A Theological Question for the Times (1889); The Authority of the Holy Scripture (1891); The Bible, the Church and the Reason (1892); The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch (1893); The Messiah of the Gospels (1894) The Messiah of the Apostles (1894); New Light on the Life of Jesus (1904); The Ethical Teaching of Jesus (1904); A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Psalms (2 vols., 1906-1907), in which he was assisted by his daughter; and The Virgin Birth of Our Lord (1909).

The native religion was an admixture of idolatry and hero-worship, of some ethical but little moral force.

Now, Spencer has clearly, though unconsciously, changed the meaning of the term " phenomenon " from subjective affection of consciousness to any fact of nature, in regarding all this evolution, cosmic, organic, mental, social and ethical, as an evolution of phenomena.

It Ethical is divided into ten chapters, the first of which, though Theory.

This ethical value is perceived by reason or understanding (which, unlike Kant, he does not distinguish), which intuitively recognizes fitness or congruity between actions, agents and total circumstances.

Notices of Price's ethical system occur in Mackintosh's Progress of Ethical Philosophy, Jouffroy's Introduction to Ethics, Whewell's History of Moral Philosophy in England; Bain's Mental and Moral Sciences.

Schleiermacher was so much struck by their excellence that he endeavoured, unsuccessfully, to obtain for Steffens a chair in the new Berlin University in 1804, in order that his own ethical teachings should be supported in the scientific department.

It was a gnosticism fluctuating not only in its relation to the Church but in its emphasis upon certain ethical and theosophical ideas.

Endowed by inheritance with a rich religious character, evangelical traditions, ethical temper and strong intellect, he developed, by wide reading in ancient and modern literature, a personality and attitude of mind which appealed to the characteristic thought and life of the period.

The prophets had an ethical conception of Yahweh; the sin of His own people and of other nations called for His intervention in judgment as the moral ruler of the world.

While John's Apocalypse is distinctly eschatological, the Epistles and the Gospels often give these conceptions an ethical and spiritual import, without, however, excluding the eschatological.

But as Dhammapala confines himself rigidly either to questions of the meaning of words, or to discussions of the ethical import of his texts, very little can be gathered from his writings of value for the social history of his time.

His editors have contented themselves with republishing his "Practical Works," and his ethical, philosophical, historical and political writings still await a competent editor.

In philosophy he found the basis for positing a, collective human will, revealing in its activities the materials for determining ethical laws.

It is opposed to the various doctrines of FreeWill, known as voluntarism, libertarianism, indeterminism, and is from the ethical standpoint more or less akin to necessitarianism and fatalism.

For his ethical theories see Ethics.

It is purely ethical, independent alike of theology and ritual, and is the code of morals as laid down in the Buddhist sacred books for laymen.

It was necessary, therefore, for Epicurus to go back to nature to find a more enduring and a wider foundation for ethical doctrine, to go back from words to realities, to give up reasonings and get at feelings, to test conceptions and arguments by a final reference to the only touchstone of truth - to sensation.

It is on this work that Rothe's permanent reputation as a theologian and ethical writer will rest.

The Fragment on Mackintosh is a severe exposure of the flimsiness and misrepresentations of Sir James Mackintosh's famous Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical Philosophy (1830), and discusses the foundations of ethics from the author's utilitarian point of view.

The sinfulness of slavery being admitted, the duty of immediate emancipation to his clear ethical instinct was perfectly manifest.

The Stoic philosophy, with its cosmopolitan note, its fixed dogmas and plain ethical precepts, came into the world at the time of the Macedonian conquests to meet the needs of the new age.

In a similar nianner, the ethical and allegorical methods of interpretation came into much greater prominence towards the end of the New Kingdom.

One incident of the tale of Osiris acquired a deep ethical meaning in connection with the dead.

It maybe described as the poetical and ethical element as contrasted with the legal element in the Talmud, but the two elements are always closely connected.

It shows, moreover, a strong resemblance to Nasir Khosrau's ethical poems and Sana'i's Hadikat-ulhakikat, or "Garden of Truth."

The first or semi-historical part shows us Alexander the Great as the conqueror of the world, while the second, of a more ethical tendency, describes him in the character of a prophet and philosopher, and narrates his second tour through the world and his adventures in the west, south, east and north.

These, however, may be conveniently classified under four main heads - psychological, logical, ethical and religious - and the history of the subject shows that all these have contributed to the development of pragmatism.

The ethical affinities of pragmatism spring from the perception that all knowing is referred to a purpose.

Of the more serious, or " ethical " or " theological " mood which counts for so much in the modern estimate of Scottish literature, there is but little evidence in the popular verse of the middle period.

The negative, un-Aryan, is used of each of the two low aims. It is possible that this rendering should have been introduced into the translation; but the ethical meaning, though still associated with the tribal meaning, had probably already become predominant in the language of the time.

In India it had already, before the rise of Buddhism, been raised into an ethical conception by the associated doctrine of Karma, according to which a man's socialpositioninlife and hisphysicaladvantages, or the reverse, were the result of his actions in a previous birth.

When two thinkers of such eminence (probably the two greatest ethical thinkers of antiquity) have arrived independently at this strange"--conclusion, have agreed in ascribing to cravings, felt in this life, so great, and to us so inconceivable, a power over the future life, we may well hesitate before we condemn the idea as intrinsically absurd, and we may take note of the important fact that, given similar conditions, similar stages in the development of religious belief, men's thoughts, even in spite of the most unquestioned individual originality, tend though they may never produce exactly the same results, to work in similar ways.

Between them these first two collections contain 186 dialogues, in which the Buddha, or in a few cases one of his leading disciples, is represented as engaged in conversation on some one of the religious, or philosophic, or ethical points in that system which we now call Buddhism.

His whole conception of life and character had deepened since Don Carlos, and under the influence of Kant's philosophy the drama became the embodiment of ethical problems that are essentially modern.

The high ethical conception of the kingly office in Proverbs is out of keeping with the despotic character of Solomon's government.

In its general ethical code Proverbs represents the best standard of the times; the sages are at one with the more enlightened moralists of the Western world.

Here, as in contemporaneous criticisms of Kant's ethical writings, Hegel aims at correcting the abstract discussion of a topic by treating it in its systematic interconnexions.

The third part of the system - the ethical theory - seems to have been composed afterwards; it is contained in its first draft in another MS. of 30 sheets.

The school system was reorganized by new regulations, in accordance with which Hegel wrote a series of lessons in the outlines of philosophy - ethical, logical and psychological.

But increasing culture presents new ideals, and the mind, absorbing the ethical spirit of its environment, gradually emancipates itself from conventions and superstitions.

But as with Aristotle so with Hegel - beyond the ethical and political sphere rises the world of absolute spirit in art, religion and philosophy.

A selection of his essays was published in Short Studies in Ecclesiastical History and Biography (1884), and Short Studies, Ethical and Religious (1885).

This does not mean of course that the religion had no ethical traits - ethical motives are frequently found in the old Oriental religions - but they were bound up with certain naturalistic conceptions of the relation between deities and men, and herein lay their weakness.4 In the age of the Assyrian supremacy Palestine entered upon a series of changes, lasting for about three centuries (from about 740), which were of the greatest significance for its internal development.

Yet, in its characteristic religion and legislation there are essential spiritual and ethical peculiarities which give it a uniqueness and a permanent value, the reality of which becomes more impressive when the Old Testament is viewed, not merely from a Christian or a Jewish teleology, but in the light of ancient, medieval and modern Palestine.

On ethical conceptions of heathen deities, see I.

Gressmann, The uniqueness of the Old Testament religion is stamped upon the Mosaic legislation, which combines in archaic manner ritual, ethical and civil enactments.

This legislation appears as that of the Israelites, newly escaped from bondage in Egypt, joined by an ethical covenant-relation with Yahweh, and waiting in the desert to enter and conquer the land of their ancestors.

While the code, according to its own lights, aims at strict justice rather than charity, the Old Testa ment has reforming aims, and the religious, legislative and social ideals are characterized by the insistence upon a lofty moral and ethical standard.

Noteworthy, again, is the appeal to religious and ethical considerations in order to prevent injustice to the widow and fatherless and to unhappy debtors; statutory laws are either unknown, or, more probably, are presupposed.

It may have been that the sophists' preference of seeming to reality, of success to truth, had a mischievous effect upon the morality of the time; but it is clear that they had no common theory of ethics, and there is no warrant for the assumption that a sophist, as such, specially interested himself in ethical questions.

In 1810 appeared the Philosophical Essays, in 1814 the second volume of the Elements, in 1815 the first part and in 1821 the second part of the "Dissertation" written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica " Supplement," entitled "A General View of the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical, and Political Philosophy since the Revival of Letters."

Stewart's philosophical views are mainly the reproduction of his master Reid (for his ethical views see Ethics).

On the ethical side, the religion of Babylonia more particularly, and to a less extent that of Assyria, advances to noticeable conceptions of the qualities associated with the gods and goddesses and of the duties imposed on man.

Though, in accounting for the anger of the gods, no sharp distinction is made between moral offences and a ritualistic oversight or neglect, yet the stress laid in the hymns and prayers, as well as in the elaborate atonement ritual prescribed in order to appease the anger of the gods, on the need of being clean and pure in the sight of the higher powers, the inculcation of a proper aspect of humility, and above all the need of confessing one's guilt and sins without any reserve - all this bears testimony to the strength which the ethical factor acquired in the domain of the religion.

The fundamental principle of the System der Ethik is carried out with great strength of thought, and with an unusually complete command of ethical material.

Thus demanding an act of will on the part of individuals, they are classed once more as " ethical " religions.

Out of these developed, by the labours of the prophets, a religion of high spirituality and exalted ethical ideals.

Thus religion is ethical through and through, as God's inner nature, expressed in forgiveness, mercy, righteousness and truth, is not something transcendental, but belongs to the realm of daily life.

As religion thus becomes thoroughly ethical, so is the notion of the Messianic kingdom transformed.

It is not primarily ethical nor even religious, but it is metaphysical.

Jesus ignores them, his emphasis being so strong upon the ethical and spiritual that the rest is passed by.

With the naturalization of the Church in the Gentile world ethical ideas became less prominent, and the sacramental system prevailed.

In quite a different way a still more influential school seeks essential Christianity in the sphere of the ethical life.

To this school Christianity is the culmination of the ethical monotheism of the Old Testament, which finds its highest ideal in selfsacrificing love.

On the one hand, in its ethical development, it is nothing less than the outworking of that principle of Jesus Christ which led him not only to selfsacrificing labour but to the death upon the cross.

This theory gives birth to a sort of ethical by-product whose dominant note is Harmony, the subordination of the individual to the universal reason; moral failure is proportionate to the degree in which the individual declines to recognize his personal transience in relation to the eternal Unity.

His work was mainly the combination of previous views, except that he is said to have introduced an ethical side into the Ionian philosophy.

The book at once became the ethical text-book of the University of Cambridge, and passed through fifteen editions in the author's lifetime.

There is similar difference of opinion as regards the statement that Archelaus formulated certain ethical doctrines.

One of them, Kubera, the god of wealth, is a new figure; whilst another, Varuna, the most spiritual and ethical of Vedic deities - the king of the gods and the universe; the nightly, star-spangled firmament - has become the Indian Neptune, the god of waters.

Not that there is any evidence of Buddhists ever having been actually persecuted by the Brahmans, or still less of Sankara himself ever having done so; but the traditional belief in some personal god, as the principal representative of an invisible, all-pervading deity, would doubtless appeal more directly to the minds and hearts of the people than the colourless ethical system promulgated by the Sakya saint.

And the tendency of contemporary religious discussion in India, so far as it can be followed from a distance, is towards an ethical reform on the old foundations, towards searching for some method of reconciling their Vedic theology with the practices of religion taken as a rule of conduct and a system of moral government.

One can already discern a movement in various quarters towards a recognition of impersonal theism, and towards fixing the teaching of the philosophical schools upon some definitely authorized system of faith and morals, which may satisfy a rising ethical standard, and may thus permanently embody that tendency to substitute spiritual devotion for external forms and caste rules which is the characteristic of the sects that have from time to time dissented from orthodox Brahminism."

The term plays an important part in metaphysical, ethical and theological speculation.

An example of this theory is the doctrine of the liberum arbitrium indifferentiae ("liberty of indifference"), according to which the choice of two or more alternative possibilities is affected neither by contemporaneous data of an ethical or prudential kind nor by crystallized habit (character).

It is useful, therefore, in a summary sketch of asceticism, to begin with the facts as they can be observed among less advanced races, or as mere survivals among people who have reached the level of genuine moral reflection; and from this basis to proceed to a consideration of self-denial consciously pursued as a method of ethical perfection.

Asceticism then in its origin was usually not ascetic in a modern sense, that is, not ethical.

It is time to pass on to Buddhist asceticism, in its essence a more ethical and philosophical product than some of the forms so far considered.

He does, however, lay much stress upon the naturally social character of man; and this points forward to that treatment of morality as a function of the social organism which characterizes modern ethical theory.

For, if the ultimate ground, of obligation lay in a refined sensitiveness to differences between right and wrong, what should be said to a man who might affirm that, just as he had no ear for music, he was insensitive to ethical differences commonly recognized ?

In 1665 he almost quarrelled with his fellow-Platonist, Henry More, because the latter had written an ethical work which Cudworth feared would interfere with his own long-contemplated treatise on the same subject.

If Coke's reports show completer mastery of technical details, greater knowledge of precedent, and more of the dogged grasp of the letter than do Bacon's legal writings, there can be no dispute that the latter exhibit an infinitely more comprehensive intelligence of the abstract principles of jurisprudence, with a richness and ethical fulness that more than compensate for their lack of dry legal detail.

No distinction was drawn between secular and religious duties, between ceremonial, ethical or spiritual requirements.

The Talmud discusses and formulates rules upon points which other religions leave to the individual; it inculcates both ceremonial and spiritual ideas, and often sets up most lofty ethical standards.

At all events, if these writings have many old elements and may be used to illustrate the background of the New Testament, they illustrate not only the excessive legalism and ritualism against which early Christianity contended, but also the more spiritual and ethical side of Judaism.

In this article religions are treated from the point of view of morphology, and no attempt can be made in the allotted limits to connect them with the phases of ritual, sociological or ethical development.

The worship of ancestors has again and again gathered around it powerful and ethical influences, emphasizing the parental and filial relations, and strengthening the mutual obligations of communal life.

In so far as tribal eminence depends on superior skill or courage or wisdom, the germs of ethical differentiation may be discovered even here.

The higher life of aesthetic and ethical activity - the beautiful and the good - can only be based upon an intuition which penetrates the heart of reality.

Duff's Spinoza's Political and Ethical Philosophy (1903) are important contributions of more recent date.

The new gods created by Iran are ethical powers; those of India, abstractions of worship (brahman) or of philosophy (atman).

The abstractions which it preaches are not products of metaphysical speculation, as in India, but rather the ethical forces which dominate human life.

Under the influence of Cerdo, Marcion carried out his ethical dualism in the sphere of cosmology; but the fact that his system is not free from contradictions is the best proof that all along religious knowledge, and not philosophical, had the chief values in his eyes.

The original ethical contrast of " good " and " just " is thus transformed into the cosmological contrast of " spirit " and " matter."

Butler never attempts to prove that a future life regulated according to the requirements of ethical law is a reality; he only desires to show that the conception of such a life is not irreconcilable with what we know of the course of nature, and that consequently it is not unreasonable to suppose that there is such a life.

From what we know of the present order of things, it is not unreasonable to suppose that there will be a future state of rewards and punishments, distributed according to ethical law.

Butler could strengthen his argument only by bringing forward prominently the absolute requirements of the ethical consciousness, in which case he would have approximated to Kant's position with regard to this very problem.

Throughout the whole of the Analogy it is manfest that the interest which lay closest to Butler's heart was the ethical.

In these sermons Butler has made substantial contributions to ethical science, and it may be said with confidence, that in their own department nothing superior in value appeared during the long interval between Aristotle and Kant.

The ethical question then is, as with Aristotle, what is the TEXos of man?

This fruitful conception of man's ethical nature as an organic unity Butler owes directly to Shaftesbury and indirectly to Aristotle; it is the strength and clearness with which he has grasped it that gives peculiar value to his system.

When pressed still further, he points to justice, veracity and the common good as comprehensive ethical ends.

His ethical principle has in it no possibility of development into a system of actual duties; it has no content.

Butler's moral theory, like those of his English contemporaries and successors, is defective from not perceiving that the notion of duty can have real significance only when connected with the will or practical reason, and that only in reason which wills itself have we a principle capable of development into an ethical system.

Thus, quite apart from the general similarity of their ethical doctrine, the Cynics were materialists; they were also nominalists, and combated the Platonic ideas; in their theory.

The Logos, which had been an ethical or psychological principle to the Cynics,.

The ethical consequences of this position will be seen at a later stage.

The ethical theory of the Stoics stands in the closest connexion with their physics, psychology and cosmology.

But once let this system be presented to men in earnest about right living, and eager to profit by what they are taught, and an ethical reform is inevitable.

They testify to the restriction of philosophy to the practical side, and to the increasing tendency, ever since Panaetius, towards a relaxation of the rigorous ethical doctrine and its approximation to the form of religious conviction.

The latter view, which receives its first support in the facts of life, or organic nature as such, finds its culmination and ultimate verification in the ethical world, which essentially consists in the realization of ends.

The ethical end is taken to be the idea of humanity, not in the abstract as formulated by Kant, but in the context of the state and of history.

Law is treated throughout as the vehicle of ethical requirements.

In Trendelenburg's treatment of the state, as the ethical organism in which the individual (the potential man) may be said first to emerge into actuality, we may trace his nurture on the best ideas of Hellenic antiquity.

Not very unlike the Menippean Satires were the Libri Logistorici, or satirical and practical expositions, possibly in dialogue form, of some theme most commonly taken from philosophy on its ethical side.

The ethical and metaphysical ideas most conspicuous in the doctrines of Lamaism are not confined to the highlands of central Asia, they are accepted in great measure also in Japan and China.

The central point of primitive Buddhism was the doctrine of "Arahatship " - a system of ethical and mental self-culture, in which deliverance was found from all the mysteries and sorrows of life in a change of heart to be reached The here on earth.

It was of no avail that they adhered in other respects in the main to the older teaching, that they professed to hold to the same ethical system, that they adhered, except in a few unimportant details, to the old regulations of the order of the Buddhist mendicant recluses.

Such had been the decline and fall of Buddhism considered as an ethical system before its introduction into Tibet.

But this ethical interest is closely bound up with his Roman sympathies.

It is a purely formal direction, and as such merely an adjunct to a substantive ethical criterion.

The same is true of ethical theories which may be described as material.

The type of ethical thought exemplified in James has been called Ebionite (Hilgenfeld).

Indeed, it was not till the 9th century, when Cousin in 1836 issued the collection entitled Ouvrages inedits d'Abelard, that his philosophical performance could be judged at first hand; of his strictly philosophical works only one, the ethical treatise Scito to ipsum, having been published earlier, namely, in 1721.

His thought in this direction, wherein he anticipated something of modern speculation, is the more remarkable because his scholastic successors accomplished least in the field of morals, hardly venturing to bring the principles and rules of conduct under pure philosophical discussion, even after the great ethical inquiries of Aristotle became fully known to them.

In Plato, however, this distinction is applied chiefly in an ethical and religious direction; and, while it defines philosophy, so far correctly, as the endeavour to express what things are in their ultimate constitution, it is not yet accompanied by a sufficient differentiation of the subsidiary inquiries by which this ultimate question may be approached.

It will not be easy to infuse into so abstract and bloodless a term as "metaphysics" the fuller life (and especially the inclusion of ethical considerations) suggested by the more concrete term "philosophy."

The second of these departments is really the proper subject-matter of ethics considered as a separate science; but it is often conspicuous by its absence from ethical treatises.

The connexion of ethics with metaphysics will be patent as a matter of fact, if it be remembered how Plato's philosophy is summed up in the idea of the good, and how Aristotle also employs the essentially ethical notion of end as the ultimate category by which the universe may be explained or reduced to unity.

The argument ex analogia hominis has often been carried too far; but if a "chief end of man" be discoverable - av9p6miruvov ayaOov, as Aristotle wisely insisted that the ethical end must be determined - then it may be assumed that this end cannot be irrelevant to that ultimate "meaning" of the universe which, according to Lotze, is the quest of philosophy.

If "the idea of humanity," as Kant called it, has ethical perfection at its core, then a universe which is really an organic whole must be ultimately representable as a moral order or a spiritual kingdom such as Leibnitz named, in words borrowed from St Augustine, a city of God.

In other words, seeing that the highest human good is realizable only in a community, the theory of the state as the organ of morality, and itself in its structure and institutions the expression of ethical ideas or qualities, becomes an integral part of philosophy.

The Ethical Characters ('HOLKOL xapaK-rlpES) deserves a separate mention.

But it represents the former as the framer of the world, as the power or spirit of God, active alike in the physical, the intellectual, and the ethical domain, and apparently objective to God.

There ethical and religious tendencies got the upper hand.

It is a vague principle, of which the ethical character depends on the interpretation; and it was variously interpreted in the school of Saint-Simon.

But the Speech on Conciliation (1775) has, perhaps, been more universally admired than any of his other productions, partly because its maxims are of a simpler and less disputable kind than those which adorn the pieces on France, and partly because it is most strongly characterized by that deep ethical quality which is the prime secret of Burke's great style and literary mastery.

The great attainment of the Old Testament, ethical monotheism, had become the common property of the nation; it occurs in Christianity as a simple presupposition.

There is an ethical rationalism which can never be wholly suppressed in the Christian Church by the Pauline or Augustinian soteriology.

Ritschl denies natural theology 4 as well as natural religion, denies dogma outright in its Greek forms - Trinitarian and Christological; and seeks to transpose the doctrine of Atonement - Christ's Person " or " Works as he puts it - from the legal to the ethical.

The third period, beginning about 1885, has been one of rationalism, recognition of universal religion, large acceptance of the scientific method and ideas and an ethical attempt to realize the higher affirmations of Christianity.

The first sort is analytical; mathematical and ethical knowledge represents the second; physical science forms the third; real knowledge of self, God and the world constitutes the fourth.

Moreover, the argument by means of which Chrysippus endeavoured to prove the compatibility of determinism with ethical responsibility is in some respects an anticipation of modern views.

The article makes no attempt to give a detailed, casuistical examination of the matter of ethical theory.

This is especially the case in connexion with technical terms (whose history and meaning are inevitably taken for granted) and biographical information about minor ethical writers.

When ethical speculation first begins, conceptions such as those of duty, responsibility, the will as the ultimate subject of moral approbation and disapprobation, are already in existence and already operative.

The influence of ideas borrowed from biology is everywhere manifest in the ethical speculations of modern times.

One of the greatest of all ethical controversies, that concerning the freedom of the will, arose directly out of what was in reality a theological problem - the necessity, namely, of reconciling God's foreknowledge with human freedom.

The naive and fragmentary precepts of conduct, which are everywhere the earliest manifestation of nascent moral reflection, are a noteworthy element in the gnomic poetry of the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. Their importance is shown by the traditional enumeration of the Seven Sages of the 6th century, and their influence on ethical thought is attested by the references of Plato and Aristotle.

Hence, whatever influence the Pythagorean blending of ethical and mathematical notions may have had on Plato, and, through him, on later thought, we cannot regard the school as having really forestalled the Socratic inquiry after a completely reasoned theory of conduct.

The ethical element in the " dark " philosophizing of Heraclitus (c. 530-470 B.C.), though it anticipates Stoicism in its conceptions of a law of the universe, to which the wise man will carefully conform, and a divine harmony, in the recognition of which he will find his truest satisfaction, is more profound, but even less systematic.

It is only when we come to Democritus, a contemporary of Socrates, the last of the original thinkers whom we distinguish as pre-Socratic, that we find anything which we can call an ethical system.

The natural reaction against the metaphysical and ethical dogmatism of the earlyg Y thinkers had reached its climax in the Sophists.

But in the true sense of the word, they had no ethical system at all, nor did they contribute save by contrast to ethical speculation.

Yet it is equally clear from Plato that there was a most important positive element in the; teaching of Socrates in virtue of which it is just to say with Alexander Bain, " the first important name in ancient ethical philosophy is Socrates."

It is only when we keep all these points in view that we can understand how from the spring of Socratic conversation flowed the divergent streams of Greek ethical thought.

Thus early in the history of ethical theory appeared the most thoroughgoing exposition of hedonism.

The first stage at which we can distinguish Plato's ethical view from that of Socrates is presented in the Protagoras, where he makes a serious, though clearly tentative effort to define the object of that knowledge which he with his master regards as the essence of all virtue.

So far the steps are plain enough; but we do not yet see how this logical Realism (as it was afterwards called) comes to have the essentially ethical character that especially interests us in Platonism.

When a student passes from Plato to Aristotle, he is so forcibly impressed by the contrast between the habits of mind of the two authors, and the literary manners of the two philosophers, that it is easy to under stand how their systems have come to be popularly conceived as diametrically opposed to each other; and the uncompromising polemic which Aristotle, both in his ethical and in his metaphysical treatises, directs against Plato and the platonists, has tended strongly to confirm this view.

Yet a closer inspection shows us that when a later president of the Academy (Antiochus of Ascalon) repudiated the scepticism which for two hundred years had been accepted as the traditional Platonic doctrine, he had good grounds for claiming Plato and Aristotle as consentient authorities for the ethical position which he took up.

But this does not interfere with the general ethical agreement between the two thinkers; and the doctrine that vicious pleasures are not true or real pleasures is so characteristically Platonic that we are almost surprised to find it in Aristotle.

In so far as there is any important difference between the Platonic and the Aristotelian views of human good, we may observe that the latter has substantially a closer correspondence to the positive element in the ethical teaching of Socrates, though it is presented in a far more technical and scholastic form, and involves a more distinct rejection of the fundamental Socratic paradox.

Ethical truth, in his view, is to be attained by careful comparison of particular moral opinions, just as physical truth is to be obtained by induction from particular physical observations.

Though common sense will admit that virtues are the best of goods, it still undoubtedly conceives practical wisdom as chiefly exercised in providing those inferior goods which Aristotle, after recognizing the need or use of them for the realization of human well-being, has dropped out of sight; and the result is that, in trying to make clear his conception of practical wisdom, we find ourselves fluctuating continually between the common notion, which he does not distinctly reject, and the notion required as the keystone of his ethical system.

Partly, no doubt, the limited influence of his disciples, the Peripatetics, is to be attributed to that exaltation of the purely speculative life which distinguished the Aristotelian ethics from other later systems, and which was too alien from the common moral consciousness to find much acceptance in an age in which the ethical aims of philosophy had again become paramount.

The intellectual descent of its ethical doctrines is principally to be traced to Socrates through the Cynics, though an important element in them seems attributable to the school that inherited the " Academy " of Plato.

The sense of the gap between theory and fact gives to the religious element of Stoicism a new force; the soul, conscious of its weakness, leans on the thought of God, and in the philosopher's attitude towards external events, pious resignation preponderates over self-poised indifference; the old self-reliance of the reason, looking down on man's natural life as a mere field for its exercise, makes room for a positive aversion to the flesh as an alien element imprisoning the spirit; the body has come to be a " corpse which the soul sustains," 1 and life a " sojourn in a strange land "; 2 in short, the ethical idealism of Zeno has begun to borrow from the metaphysical idealism of Plato.

The alterations, however, in the metaphysical position of the Academics had little effect on their ethical teach ing, as, even during the period of Scepticism, they appear to have presented as probable the same general view of human good which Antiochus afterwards dogmatically announced as a revival of the common doctrine of Plato and Aristotle.

Nor have we to consider the special doctrines that have formed the bond of union of the Christian communities except in their ethical aspect, their bearing on the systematization of human aims and activities.

Hence, even if the notion of law had been more prominent than it was in ancient ethical thought, it could never have led to a juridical, as distinct from a philosophical, treatment of morality.

In this aspect Christianity invites comparison with Stoicism, and indeed with pagan ethical philosophy generally, if we except the hedonistic schools.

Of these notions the former has a somewhat complex ethical import; it seems to blend several elements differently prominent in different minds.

So far, however, there is no ethical difference between Christian faith and that of Judaism, or its later imitation, Mahommedanism; except that the personal affection of loyal trust is peculiarly stirred by the blending of human and divine natures in Christ, and the rule of duty impressively taught by the manifestation of his perfect life.

In Judaism, as in other, especially Oriental, religions, the natural dislike of material defilement has been elevated into a religious sentiment, and made to support a complicated system of quasi-sanitary abstinences and ceremonial purifications; then, as the ethical element predominated in the Jewish religion, a moral symbolism was felt to reside in the ceremonial code, and thus aversion to impurity came to be a common form of the ethico-religious sentiment.

Again, - just as the Stoics held wisdom to be indispensable to real rectitude of conduct, while at the same time they included under the notion of wisdom a grasp of physical as well as ethical truth, so the similar emphasis laid on inwardness in Christian ethics caused orthodoxy or correctness of religious belief to be regarded as essential to goodness, and heresy as the most fatal of vices, corrupting as it did the very springs of Christian life.

P Y g Changes in the external condition of Christianity, the different degrees of civilization in the societies of which it was the dominant religion, and the natural g process of internal development, continually brought different features into prominence; while again, the important antagonisms of opinion within Christendom frequently involved ethical issues - even in the Eastern Church - until in the 4th century it began to be absorbed in the labour of a dogmatic construction.

Under the influence of Ambrose and Augustine, the four cardinal virtues furnished a basis on which the systematic ethical theories of subsequent theologians were built.

But Medieval before giving a brief account of the ethical part of his moral system, it will be well to notice the salient points in philo- the long and active discussion that led up to it.

Accordingly the ethical side of this doctrine has the same negative and ascetic character that we have observed in Neoplatonism.

This side of Thomas's system is specially important, since it is just this blending of theological conceptions with the abstract theory of the later Roman law that gave the starting-point for independent ethical thought in the modern world.