lieved to be nothing but ordinary light of exceedingly short wave-length, and others are believed, at least tentatively, to consist in the actual emission of storms of corpuscles, or "electrons," from the bodies from which they proceed. (See ELECTRON; RADIUM; RADIATION.) Gravitative action has also been attributed to ether stresses, and it is indeed probable that this is its real nature. No mechanical explanation of gravitation, as an ether-phenomenon, has yet been offered, however, to which serious objections cannot be urged. In Maxwell's theory of gravitation it is assumed that bodies produce a stress in the ether about them, of such a nature that there is a pressure along the lines of gravitative force, combined with an equal tension in all directions at right angles to those lines. "Such a state of stress," says Maxwell, "would no doubt account for the observed effects of gravitation. We have not, however, been able, hitherto, to imagine any physical cause for such a state of stress." He calculates that to produce the actual effects of gravity, as observed at the surface of the earth, the ether would have to be subject to a pressure of 37,000 tons per square inch in a vertical direction, and a tension of the same numerical magni

tude in all horizontal directions.

One of the most obvious difficulties in the way of the ether-theory is that the planets, and even the atoms, move through space as though it were absolutely empty. According to modern notions, however, the atom may be only an aggregate of still smaller "electrons," each of which may transpire to be nothing but a state of strain in the ether; and if this proves to be the case, we are certainly not in position at present to say that the ether would oppose in the slightest degree the transmission of such a state of strain through its own substance. The difficulty with the theory of aberration is more formidable. If a shower of rain is falling vertically, the drops will appear to an observer to descend vertically so long as he remains stationary. If he moves forward, however, the drops will strike him in the face, and will therefore appear, to him, to come from some point slightly in advance of the zenith, rather than from the zenith itself. A similar phenomenon is observed in connection with light, and is known as aberration. Every star is seen in its true position when the earth is moving directly toward it; but three months later, when the earth is moving at right angles to this direction, the observer's telescope will have to be inclined slightly toward the direction in which the earth is moving, in order that the light from the star may come down through the instrument centrally. The maximum displacement that a star can have, from this cause, is known by observation to be about 20.47 seconds of arc on the heavens. If the ether were motionless, the analogy with the rain-drops would be perfect, and the "constant of aberration," whose value has just been given, could be calculated from the known velocity of light, and the known velocity of the earth's orbital motion. It is found, however, that the theory of aberration is exceedingly complicated when the possibility of currents in the ether is admitted, and hence physicists have been much concerned to know whether or not the earth drags the adjacent ether along with it, in its motion around the sun. As long ago as 1859 Fizeau showed, by

a justly celebrated experiment, that the ether is apparently dragged along by a current of water flowing through a tube; and Michelson and Morley have since shown, by an even more ingenious experiment, that there is evidence that the ether in the immediate vicinity of the earth participates in the earth's motion to such an extent that any difference that may exist does not amount to the twentieth part of the whole motion. Lodge, on the other hand, found no evidence of any "ether drag" in the space between two rapidly whirled steel plates that were separated by an interval of one inch. (See Preston, Theory of Light.') The whole subject of the "drag" of the ether is still unsettled; but the observed value of the constant of aberration appears to require that the ether is not disturbed by the motion of the earth through it.

The most noteworthy book on the ether, in recent times, is Larmor's Ether and Matter,' which (like all other advanced works on the same subject) is difficult reading. Consult, also, Drude, Physik des Ethers.'

Etherege, eth'er-ej, SIR George, English dramatist: b. about 1635; d. 1691. In 1664 appeared his first comedy, The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub'; an incongruous mixture of prose and verse, but suited to the taste of the times, and well received. The author was immediately enrolled among the courtly wits of the day, and in 1668 brought out She Would if She Could, which was very coarse and licentious. In 1676 he produced his third and last comedy, entitled 'The Man of the Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter. This performance was still more applauded than the preceding, and the Sir Fopling was, for a long time, deemed the ideal of the superlative beau or coxcomb of lively conversation pieces, with a great paucity the age. Etherege's plays are little more than of genuine humor or felicitous plot.

Ethical Movement and Ethical Societies in America and Abroad. The first Ethical Society was established and the Ethical Movement inaugurated in 1876 in New York by Felix Adler, then a lecturer at Cornell University. In response to a call, several hundred persons met in May at Standard Hall, and at the conclusion of Prof. Adler's address, outlining the purpose and spirit of the proposed organization, the Society for Ethical Culture of New York was constituted. In this address he appealed to his auditors to unfurl a new flag of peace and conciliation over the bloody battlegrounds where religions had fought in the past; he laid stress upon the urgent need of a higher and sterner morality to cope with the moral perils of the hour, especially noting the growing laxity that accompanied the decline of discredited forms of religious belief; and he placed peculiar emphasis upon the duty of caring for the moral education of the young. The society thus initiated grew rapidly, and soon gave practical effect to his programme. Within a few years it had established a free kindergarten for the children of the poor, the first of its kind in New York; and this developed into a workingman's school, based upon the Froebelian pedagogy, which was the first school to introduce manual training and systematic ethical instruction into the curriculum. It also inaugurated a system of trained nurses for the poor, which has since become an adjunct of dispensary out-door relief in the city. Nor were

the larger social and political applications of morality to contemporary life neglected: its leader devoting special attention in his platform utterances to the labor problem and specific social reforms, as being at bottom great moral issues. His vigorous exposure of the evils of the tenement houses bore fruit in the creation of the Tenement House Commission of 1884, of which he was appointed a member. He also was among the first advocates of small parks in the congested districts, of public playgrounds and public baths; and, above all, of greater justice and humanity in the relations between labor and capital, employer and employed. The Labor party here found a new type of advocate; and reformers and politicians a platform from which the issues of the hour were brought to the touchstone of ethical first-principles.

Meanwhile, the society filled more and more the place of a church in the lives of its hitherto unchurched members. It did not neglect the problems of the personal life; but aimed to illuminate and inspire its members in their dealings with the problems of the home and the vocation, family relations, marriage, the training of the young, etc. Its position as a distinctive religious organization became better understood and its religious appeal more forcibly felt, while its practical educational and philanthropic activities continued to multiply. Its schools, testifying to its conviction that moral improvement must begin with the care and education of the young, expanded until kindergarten, normal and high school departments were added. These have for some time been inadequately housed. The Sunday audiences, too, have twice outgrown their accommodations. To meet its requirements, the Society is erecting at Central Park West and 63d Street, a thoroughly modernized school building, next to which an appropriately dignified meeting place and society-house will later on be added. The very thoroughly equipped school house will enable the society, in greater measure even than in the past, to fulfil its cherished aim of having a model and experimental school, standing for the highest ideals of non-sectarian education and the most efficient pedagogical methods of realizing them. What distinguishes these from many other similar schools is their democratic organization and spirit: like the public schools, they educate children both of the well-to-do and of the poor, that is, an equal proportion of pay pupils and pupils admitted under a system of free scholarships endowed by the Society.

To give further effect to its conception of a religious society as a body of workers, bent upon learning by doing and promoting piety by service, the society opens to its members many other fields of education and philanthropic activity. Here the women of the society take a prominent part. Most of the philanthropies are affiliated under a general representative body known as the Women's Conference, through whose recent initiative and effort the Manhattan Trade School for Girls was established. Fortunate in drawing an unusual number of young men to its ranks, the Society has a strong Young Men's Union which contributes largely to the support of two neighborhood houses: the Hudson Guild on the West Side, of which Dr. John Lovejoy Elliott, one of Prof. Adler's associate lecturers, is the head worker; and the Down

Town Ethical Society, on the lower East Side. The Union also owns and supports a summer home on its farm of 70 acres at Mountainville, N. Y., where a farm school is held, and a summer holiday is given to groups of the boys and girls who belong to the Neighborhood clubs. The larger policies and relations of all the working bodies of the society are considered and shaped by a Council of Fifty, composed of representatives from all of them. One other event in the history of the society that calls for mention is the recent appointment of Prof. Adler to the newly created chair of political and social ethics at Columbia University. As the chair was endowed with a view to Prof. Adler's tenure of it at the instigation of some members of the wellknown Committee of Fifteen appointed by the Chamber of Commerce to deal with the social evil in New York, of which committee Prof. Adler was an active member, this appointment is a remarkable public tribute to the large public place which the founder of the ethical movement has won for himself and for it.

Early in the history of the society, a number of young men were attracted to it, and, after a period of apprenticeship in New York, went forth to found societies in Chicago, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, and across the seas in London. These American societies are under the leadership respectively of William M. Salter, S. Burns Weston and Walter L. Sheldon; and, while loosely federated in a union, they maintain an individuality of their own, and have developed different forms of activity according to local needs and circumstances. They all hold Sunday exercises, which consist for the most part of music, readings, and an address. All admit to membership on a simple declaration of devotion to the ethical ends set up. All attach great importance to the moral and religious education of the young, and maintain well-organized Sunday schools and associations and clubs of young men and young women devoted to the same end and to various kinds of practical work. From the publishing and literary headquarters of the Ethical Union in Philadelphia (S. Burns Weston, 1305 Arch Street) is issued monthly 'Ethical Addresses, containing the more important lectures of the leaders; and the International Journal of Ethics,' under a committee of ethical specialists in America and Europe with Mr. Weston as managing editor. The New York society publishes bi-monthly the 'Ethical Record,' a journal of practical ethics, edited by Percival Chubb, also one of Prof. Adler's associate lecturers. Among the literary products of the American societies are Prof. Adler's Creed and Deed,' 'Moral Instruction of Children,' and 'Life and Destiny); Mr. Salter's Ethical Religion'; Mr. Sheldon's 'An Ethical Movement,' 'An Ethical Sunday School,' and 'Old Testament Bible Stories as a Basis for Ethical Instruction of the Young.'

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That the movement initiated in America expressed no merely local phase of religious development is evident by its still more rapid spread in Europe. American influences led to the establishment in 1886 of the London Ethical Society with which Profs. Muirhead, Bosanquet, Bonar, and others, upon whom the ethical influence of Thomas Hill Green of Oxford had been profound, were identified; and under its

and earth for its beams and rafters, science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry." The development of advanced Unitarianism through Channing and Parker had been in this direction. It had two practical outcomes the Free Religious Association, which still holds annual sessions; and the Ethical Movement. As distinguished from the Free Religious Association, which expressed vaguely the libertarian tendencies of Emerson's thought, the Ethical Movement gave effect to the positive and constructive tendency which found clear utterance in his prophecy. Although this positive spirit was present in the religious society conducted in New York by Octavius B. Frothingham-who was wont to say, after he had retired and it had disbanded, that its legitimate successor was the Society for Ethical Culture-it was not until Felix Adler brought to the new movement at once an ethical outlook and philosophy learned chiefly in the school of Kant, an impassioned Hebraic sense of religion as righteousness of life, and a practical sense of the urgency and ethical import of the great impending moral issues in the social, industrial, and political world, that conditions existed for the full birth of the new ethical religion.

The most distinctive feature of this new phase of religious development was that it did not propose to add to the religions of the past, in the way in which these had multiplied, namely, on the basis of differences of speculative belief. Instead, it announced the basic importance and the priority of the ethical factor in religion. It approached religion, not from the credal, but from the practical moral standpoint; and it saw, in a common affirmation of this priority and supremacy of virtue and the good life, a ground of union for people of varying philosophical convictions, or none. Following Emerson, it asserted that character and conduct condition creed and thought; and that it is only by sowing a worthy character that men can reap a vital and meaningful creed. It contended that no certain and lasting basis of union can be found in anything so variable and personal as one's philosophical view of the world; and that no one should pledge his intellectual future by subscribing to-day to a creed which to-morrow he may outgrow. What a man thinks is the result of what he is, the outcome, therefore, of his action, his experience, his effort and his love, far more than it is the outcome of his deliberate thought and accumulated knowledge. This position differed from that of the Comtian Positivists because theirs assumed a final, definite, and in some respects, very negative philosophy. The new movement allowed for the greatest individual differences in men's philosophical interpretation of life, save in the one tenet that all must acknowledge the sacred obligation imposed by man's moral nature to live the good life and to follow without swerving the dictates of duty according to the best light that is in each.

On the basis of this moral earnestness and this attitude of moral resolve men may safely and hopefully work backward into a philosophy and forward into a faith. Their philosophy and their theory of moral sanction may be what it will, theistic or pantheistic, materialistic or idealistic; it may or may not issue in a faith in immortality, conditional or absolute. This is a

personal concern, and the statements on such matters frequently made by the leaders of ethical societies who differ much in their philosophies, are merely expressions of personal conviction, and not made as in any way committing the societies. This is to make a clear distinction between the private and the public factors of religious belief; and to find as the only possible basis for religious union, for those who would jealously guard their intellectual integrity, a moral aim by which any man should be ashamed not to be bound.

The ethical movement has been criticized, notably of late by Charles Booth, in his concluding volume reporting the life of the poor in London, as lacking in imaginative color and appeal, and therefore unlikely to spread among the masses of the people. Perhaps Emerson was right in emphasizing the austerities of the new religion in its early protestant phases. But at heart it is genial and passionately human. It has nothing sensationally novel to offer; it does not compete with picturesque claimants like Theosophy, Christian Science, Vedantism, etc., and it may be a fact that "plain goodness," "mere morality," "the beauty of holiness," will not yet draw many with their old-new evangel. And yet one finds among its adherents nothing less than a new type of the religious temperament, voicing a new imaginative sense of the hidden mysteries and wonders of the moral personality, the new unrevealed heights and depths of the moral life, the unrealized joyousness of devotion to duty and to service. PERCIVAL CHUBB,

Editor the Ethical Record.

Ethics (from Gr. oká, having to do with conduct, from 00s, character, lengthened form of ělos, custom, manners; cf. morals, from Latin, mos, mores, customs), that branch of the theory of conduct which is concerned with the formation and use of judgments of right and wrong, and with intellectual, emotional, and executive, or overt, phenomena, which are associated with such judgments, either as antecedents or consequents. As a branch of the theory of conduct, it is generically akin to the sciences of jurisprudence, politics and economics; but it is marked off from such sciences in that it considers the common subject-matter of human conduct from the standpoint of rightness and wrongness. Such terms as good and evil, the dutiful or obligatory, might be used in the definition as substitutes for the terms "right" and "wrong," but good and evil are somewhat too wide in scope, including, for instance, economic utilities, commodities and satisfactions; while duty is somewhat too narrow an idea, emphasizing the notion of control at the expense of the idea of the good and desirable. "Right" and "wrong" designate exactly those phases of good and evil to which the idea of the obligatory is also applicable. The terms moral philosophy, moral science, and morals have also been used to designate the same subject of inquiry.

In its historical development, ethics has been regarded as a branch of philosophy, as a science, and as an art-often as a composite of two or all of these in varying proportions. As a branch of philosophy, it is the business of ethics to investigate the nature and reality of certain conceptions in connection with fundamental theories of the universe. It is the theory of reality in

its moral aspect. The term good is taken to denote or describe a property of ultimate and absolute being. As such, it is usually co-ordinated with two other fundamental properties of reality, the true and the beautiful; and the three philosophic disciplines are defined as ethics, logic, and æsthetics. Even when so much emphasis is not thrown upon the place of the good in the general scheme of the universe, ethics may still be regarded as a branch of philosophy, because concerned with the ideal, with what ought to be, or with what is absolutely desirable, as distinct from the actual, the existent, the phenomenal. From this point of view, ethics is regarded as normative in character, that is, concerned with establishing and justifying certain ultimate norms, standards, and rules of action.

In contrast with such functions, ethics as a science is concerned with collecting, describing, explaining and classifying the facts of experience in which judgments of right and wrong are actually embodied or to which they apply. It is subdivided into social, or sociological, ethics, and individual, or psychological, ethics. (a) The former deals with the habits, practices, ideas, beliefs, expectations, institutions, etc., actually found in history or in contemporary life, in different races, peoples, grades of culture, etc., which are outgrowths of judgments of the moral worth of actions or which operate as causes in developing such judgments. Up to the present, social ethics has been developed mainly in connection, (1) with discussion of the evolution of morality, either by itself or in connection with institutions of law and judicial procedure, or of religious cult and rite; or (2) with problems of contemporary social life, particularly with questions of philanthropy, penology, legislation, regarding divorce, the family and industrial reform-such as childlabor, etc. In both aspects it is closely connected with the science of sociology. It is sometimes called inductive, or in its second aspect, applied ethics. (b) Psychological ethics is concerned with tracing in the individual the origin and growth of the moral consciousness, that is, of judgments of right and wrong, feelings of obligation, emotions of remorse, shame, of desire for approbation; of the various habits of action which are in accord with the judgment of right, or the virtues; with the possibility and nature, from the standpoint of the psychical structure of the individual, of free, or voluntary, action. It gathers and organizes psychological data bearing upon the nature of intention, and motive; desire, effort and choice; judgments of approbation and disapprobation; emotions of sympathy, pity in relation to the impulse of self-preservation and the formation and reformation of habit in its effect upon character, etc. In other words, it treats behavior as an expression of certain psychical elements and groupings, or associations: psychological analysis.

Ethics as an art is concerned with discovering and formulating rules of acting in accordance with which men may attain their end. These rules may be considered as of the nature either of injunctions or commands, which prescribe as well as instruct; or as technical formula which indicate to the individual the best way of proceeding toward a desired result, thus not different in kind from rules of painting, or of carpentry. Which view is taken depends usually upon the

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kind of philosophy with which ethics as an art is associated. Ethics as an art may also be an outgrowth of either a general philosophy of conduct, or of a scientific analysis of it. Thus, from the philosophic point of view, a recent writer, Sorley, in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (Vol. I., p. 346, 1902), says of ethics: "It has to do not merely with actual conduct, but with right or good conduct, and accordingly with an ideal from which rules may be laid down for actual conduct." It is clear that the philosophical establishment of the ideal is considered to terminate in rules for its attainment. On the other hand, Jeremy Bentham in his Principles of Legislation' (1789), having before insisted that ethics is a science whose truths are to be discovered "only by inves tigations as severe as mathematical ones, and beyond all comparison more intricate and extensive," goes on to define ethics "as the art of directing men's actions to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness," and says it is the business of private ethics "to instruct each individual in what manner to govern his own conduct in the details of life.» Thus as an art ethics may be grounded upon either a philosophy or a science.

As may readily be inferred from the above account, some of the most serious problems of ethics at present are concerned with defining and delimiting its own scope, basis and aims. From a purely abstract point of view, all three concep tions can exist harmoniously side by side. It is possible theoretically to regard certain topics as assigned to ethics as a branch of philosophy, others to its scientific phase, and others to the practical, or to ethics as an art. But no consensus as to these various possible assignments exists. Usually those who insist that ethics is a branch of philosophy deny that it can be anything else; they deny that any descriptive and explanatory account of actual, as distinct from ideal, conduct, deserves the name of ethics. What we have above treated as belonging to the science of ethics is by them treated as really a matter of history, sociology and psychology, not of ethics proper at all. Thus Green, Prolegomena to Ethics' (1883), begins by attempting to prove that a natural science of ethics is inherently impossible, because moral conduct by its nature implies an ideal that transcends actual conduct which alone can be made a matter of observation and experiment, and sets up an obligation which in its absoluteness transcends all the sanctions of experience.. On the other hand, those who have occupied themselves with the scientific analysis of moral behavior and charactor, have usually denied the legitimacy of the philosophic aspect. Thus Bentham expressly regards all philosophical inquiries as doomed to result in sterility, in mere dogmatic personal assertions, or, as he calls them, "ipse dixits." A more recent writer, Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics' (1882), without absolutely denying the possibility in the remote future of a metaphysics of conduct, says that the metaphysical view is entirely irrelevant to a scientific treatment. Along with this uncertainty as to the defining aim and characteristic methods of ethics, are naturally found a large number of subordinate and secondary controversies and divisions of opinion.

As a matter of fact, however, in every historical period there have been found in ethical