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Ethics gives to History its rational goal; and all morality has the perfect shaping of universal history as its ultimate end. A real understanding of history is not possible without ethics; universal history is the realization of the moral…within humanity.—Adolf Wuttke.

The real Advance made by Thucydides consists, perhaps, in this, that he perceived the motive forces of human history to be in the moral constitution of human nature.—Leopold von Ranke.

Ethics, if it is to become truly a science, must shun the path of speculation and follow closely the historical method…. Range in fancy over the whole circle of the sciences, and you will find there no place for ethics save as a branch of human history…. Given the earliest morality of which we have any written record, to trace from it through progressive stages the morality of to-day; that is the problem, and the only problem which can fall to a truly scientfic ethics…. Ethics as the comparative history of universal morality is the vestibule to the temple of moral philosophy.—Jacob Gould Schurman.

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