For fifteen years this Manual has enjoyed all the popularity that its
author could desire. With that popularity the author is the last
person to wish to interfere. Therefore, not to throw previous copies
out of use, this edition makes no alteration either in the pagination
or the text already printed. At the same time the author might well be
argued to have lapsed into strange supineness and indifference to
moral science, if in fifteen years he had learnt nothing new, and
found nothing in his work which he wished to improve. Whoever will be
at the expense of purchasing my _Political and Moral Essays_
(Benziger, 1902, 6s.) will find in the first essay on the _Origin and
Extent of Civil Authority_ an advantageous substitute for the chapter
on the State in this work. The essay is a dissertation written for the
degree of B. Sc. in the University of Oxford; and represents, I hope,
tolerably well the best contemporary teaching on the subject.

If the present work had to be rewritten, I should make a triple
division of Moral Philosophy, into Ethics, Deontology (the science of
[Greek: to deon], i.e., of what _ought_ to be done), and Natural Law.
For if "the principal business of Ethics is to determine what moral
obligation is" (p. 2), then the classical work on the subject, the
_Nicomachean Ethics_ of Aristotle, is as the play of Hamlet with the
character of Hamlet left out: for in that work there is no analysis of
moral obligation, no attempt to "fix the comprehension of the idea I
_ought_" (ib.). The system there exposed is a system of Eudaemonism,
not of Deontology. It is not a treatise on Duty, but on Happiness: it
tells us what Happiness, or rational well-being, is, and what conduct
is conducive to rational well-being. It may be found convenient to
follow Aristotle, and avow that the business of Ethics is not Duty,
not Obligation, not Law, not Sanction, but Happiness. That fiery
little word _ought_ goes unexplained in Ethics, except in an