248 W. L. DAVIDSON :
place him in the midst of other men, and these conceptions immediately emerge : and not only do they emerge, but they are strengthened and developed. A man acts on his social surroundings and his social surroundings act upon him, and through this mutual action and reaction of subject and environment the moral nature has come to be what it is. It was the fault of the older moralists that they viewed man too much as an isolated individual, and it is perhaps the fault of the moderns that they are disposed to ignore his individuality ; but self and sociality must both be taken into account, and you cannot, without disastrous ethical conse- quences, separate the man from his environment. Next come Ethics and Jurisprudence. The relation here is obviously very close ; for Jurisprudence has to deal with rights and positive law law as embodied in national arrangements or as relating to general society. It, there- fore, meets ethics on its social side ; and many juridical con- ceptions are transported into ethical science, such as Law, Sanction, &c. Ethics, however, reacts on Jurisprudence, and elevates its conception of Justice as it is by keeping before the minds of jurists the conception of Justice as it ought to be. Legal right and ethical right are not always identical ; but the tendency, as civilisation advances, is to make them so. Take, next. Ethics and Ontology : regarding which, it may at once be said that the connexion here is not quite of the same kind as we have seen it to be in the other cases. There it was a relation of dependence, the methods, laws and prin- ciples of Psychology, for instance, were seen as carried over into Ethics. Not so here. The metaphysical or ontological data of Ethics, if they are recognised at all, must be recog- nised as implications ; something that is found, upon analysis of ethical phenomena, to be presupposed, fundamental, not as being first in the order of time, but as being involved in the revelations of the moral consciousness. These meta- physical data are usually put down (after Kant) as three in number : (1) The Freedom of the Will, (2) the Immortality of the Soul, (3) the Existence of God. Concerning which, all that need here be said is that the second occupies an entirely different position from the other two. For, if the first be implied in the notion of Obligation (" ought implies can ") and the third be involved in the Authority or Supremacy of Conscience, the other is a datum only at the second remove. All that Conscience at the most testifies is, that virtue ought to be rewarded and vice punished. We have to look to our experience of the world around us and see that virtue is fre-