Examples of the Practical Application of the Moral
Test to existing Morality.



PROGRESSIVE MORALITY.


* * * * *


CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION. THE SANCTIONS OF CONDUCT.


All reflecting men acknowledge that both the theory and the practice of
morality have advanced with the general advance in the intelligence and
civilisation of the human race. But, if this be so, morality must be a
matter capable of being reasoned about, a subject of investigation and
of teaching, in which the less intelligent members of a community have
always something to learn from the more intelligent, and the more
intelligent, in their turn, have ever fresh problems to solve and new
material to study. It becomes, then, of prime importance to every
educated man, to ask what are the data of Ethics, what is the method by
which its general principles are investigated, what are the
considerations which the moralist ought to apply to the solution of the
complex difficulties of life and action. And still, in spite of these
obvious facts, ethical investigation, or any approach to an independent
review of the current morality, is always unpopular with the great mass