The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-05-24
DR. \. ]. DICKINSON DELIVERS ADDRESS Occasion of JudSon College
 Commencement ETHICS IS HIS SUBJECT Address Was Very Scholarly and Was Listened to With Great Interest
 By Students and Many
 Visitors.

Marion, May 2S.-(Special )-Dr A. J. Dickinson of Birmingham delivered the commencement sermon at Judson college tonight.
 He said in part:
 The study of ethics Is one of the oldest among human dlscipllnes Yet very little advance has been made in It's methods. It has always been an effort to discover the law and apply 1t to life Hence ethi- cal study has always been legalistic, priori. deductive whether in the Intuition alistic, Hedonlstic of Utilitarian schools. This faulty method has made 1t purely mental discipline without benefit in moral culture.
 Tellc Ethics.
 The study of ethics has been of but little if any more benefit to the culture of moral character than the study of optics Is In improving impaired vision or acoustics in the cause of deafness. This moral sterIlty of the tradional ethics
 has long since been exposed by the Apostle Paul in his letters and by Jesus in his polemics with the Pharsees, and yet so great has been The influence of Greek thought in the church that her ethics in spite of the attitude of her founders. has remained unto this day that of the Rabbins and Stolcs in its method of research.
 Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mills received the polemics of Jesus and Paul in this matter and may be said to have given us the new movement for positive, inductive, a postiori, ethics which pur- sued the methods of research approved in modern sciences.
 A New Ethical System.
 But 1t remained for our own gener- ation to launch the first system of pos itive ethics since the days of Jesus, which bids fair to serve as a real culture of moral character.
 This new ethics finds It's warrant in cer- tain as yet crude conclusions in sociologi- cal psychology. It proposes to discover how men ought to act by study of how they do act. So we must get our premises from this new study.
 What is man as a social being Is our first question and we get from our social
 
 ter of certain elemental social forces called desires" Just as an atom, the elemental physical individual, Is known to us only as a center of physical forms of various kinds, so person is a vortex of psychical apetences, seeking, satls- | faction in the psychicaf social world. So we may say in technical terms. man | Is a center of social interest of varied | denomination and of varying degrees of | intensity. These interests social psychol- 1 ogists have reduced to a six-fold common l denomination of deslres-ror O health, | @ wealth, CD sociability, (D knowledge, (0 beauty. (6) rightness. Every man is a center of desires very complex, but in one or more of these denominations in varied coefficients and opponents of in- tensity measured by Algebraic Formula. Each one of you are, in Algebraic lan- guage equal to desires for health to tn power wealth to the 0, sociability to the D. knowledge to the q, beauty to the r, and rightness to the s. q hope each of you recognize yourselves in this lucid presentation)
 These various combinations and pre- | sentations of desires in their varied CO., efficients and opponents of intensity make your varied characters and the changes which go on during life in the complexity of the desires that form your characters | determine the progress or regress of | of your life process.
 This Is what the wise man meant when he said: "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he," and his exhortation to his pu- pill that, Above all keeping, keep thy | heart for out of it are the issues of life" 1 It Is what our Lord referred to when he said: Not that which entereth into a man defieth the man, but what cometh forth out of the heart, for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh."
 It is the premise for his rule for moral improvement in the saying, "The good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good and the evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which Is evil" Make the tree good and the fruit good for the tree Is known by it's fruit It is the premise of the Apostle Paul when he makes transformation and renovation of heart the beginning of the righteous life. It is the real meaning of that much misunderstood biblical word temperance or "self control
 What Character Consists Of.
 So character is an hierarchy of desires and Is dependent upon the proper co-ordi- nation and correlation of these desires. What you love will determine what you are.
 Young ladies. the kind of sweethearts you will attract depends largely on what you are as well as what he is. Your training here has been to so organize your natural desires and tastes to equip you to be the best in the world and at tract the best into your life The Judson has equipped many a girl to get better husband than otherwise she could have done. and those of us who have had ex- perience in life know that this is no mean service.
 Proper Adjustment of Desires. | Now this new ethics is to help you so | to organize your own physical life as to l put each natural desire Into its proper re- l Ia tion to every other that the whole will