ABSTRACT
The tradition of modern thought presents philosophy as asking at the outset of its task three vital questions: What can we know? What ought we to do? What may we hope? Ethics applies itself to the creative power in man. Here human intelligence is seeking and finding the pathway to the meaning of life. But in this it is practical. Man thus moulds life. In the sense ethics is practical philosophy. It is not a shaping of human life regardless of man's intelligence, but is precisely his own advance towards his own free fashioning of life. For most persons the limit of life's narrowest interests, of the most positive egoistic relations, dictated by the stress of the moment, is at the same time the limit of their moral universe. The life of man to-day is not favourable to depth of insight. Ethical man is in everything the opposite of the precipitate and apathetic man.
