Transcriber's Notes:
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A few typographical errors have been corrected. They have beenunderlined in the text. Position your mouse over the word to see thecorrection. A complete set of notes follows the text.
[i]
BY
President of Bowdoin College
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
[ii]
Copyright, 1892,
BY
HENRY HOLT & CO.
THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS,
RAHWAY, N. J.
[iii]
The steady stream of works on ethics during the last ten years, risingalmost to a torrent within the past few months, renders it necessary foreven the tiniest rill to justify its slender contribution to the alreadyswollen flood.
On the one hand treatises abound which are exhaustive in theirpresentation of ethical theory. On the other hand books are plenty whichgive good moral advice with great elaborateness of detail. Each type ofwork has its place and function. The one is excellent mental gymnasticfor the mature; the other admirable emotional pabulum for the childishmind. Neither, however, is adapted both to satisfy the intellect andquicken the conscience at that critical period when the youth has putaway childish things and is reaching out after manly and womanly ideals.
The book which shall meet this want must have theory; yet the theorymust not be made obtrusive, nor stated too abstractly. The theory mustbe deeply imbedded in the structure of the work; and must commenditself, not by metaphysical deduction from first principles, but by itsability to comprehend [iv]in a rational and intelligible order the concretefacts with which conduct has to do.
Such a book must be direct and practical. It must contain clear-cutpresentation of duties to be done, virtues to be cultivated, temptationsto be overcome, and vices to be shunned: yet this must be done, not bypreaching and exhortation, but by showing the place these things occupyin a coherent system of reasoned knowledge.
Such a blending of theory and practice, of faith and works, is the aimand purpose of this book.
The only explicit suggestions of theory are in the introduction (whichshould not be taken as the first lesson) and in the last two chapters.Religion is presented as the consummation, rather than the foundation ofethics; and the brief sketch of religion in the concluding chapter isconfined to those broad outlines which are accepted, with more or lessexplicitness, by Jew and Christian, Catholic and Protestant, Orthodoxand Liberal.
Bowdoin College,
Brunswick, Me. May 10, 1892.<