the Intuitionists were opponents of the traditional--as we may call
it--the Christian morality of modern civilisation. They both adopted
and defended the well-recognised virtues of truth and justice, of
temperance and benevolence, which have been accepted by the common
tradition of ages as the expression of man's moral consciousness. The
Intuitionists no doubt were sometimes regarded--they may indeed have
sometimes regarded themselves--as in a peculiar way the guardians of
the traditional morality, and as interested more than their opponents
in defending a view in harmony with man's spiritual essence and
inheritance. But we do not find any attack upon the main content
of morality by the Utilitarian writers. On the contrary, they were
interested in vindicating their own full acceptance of the traditional
morality. This is, in particular, the case with John Stuart Mill, the
high-minded representative of the Utilitarian philosophy in the middle
of last century. "In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth," he says,
"we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one
would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute
the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality."[1]

[Footnote 1: Utilitarianism, 9th ed., pp. 24, 25.]

No doubt Mill was a practical reformer as well as a philosophical
thinker, and he wished on certain special points to revise the
accepted code. He says that "the received code of ethics is by no
means of divine right, that mankind has still much to learn as to the
effects of actions on the general happiness."[1] He would even take
this point--the modifiability of the ordinary moral code--as a sort
of test question distinguishing his own system from that of the
intuitional moralists; and in one place he says that "the contest
between the morality which appeals to an external standard, and