Occasionally a book is difficult to review because it comes so close to fulfilling the promises of its preface that the reviewer becomes self-conscious and worries that his assessment sounds like advertising copy rather than a critical evaluation. Professor Ardley’s concise and elegant monograph on Berkeley is just such a book.

As many before have done, Richards uses several brief reflections on ethics as a springboard to his discussion of values. In the reviewer’s opinion, much of his seemingly endless wandering during the bulk of the book is due to his mistaken notions about ethics. Richards begins by confusing the justification of moral judgments with the genesis of moral language in a child. Then he speaks of the collapse of ethics because of the amorality of nature and the amorality of man. (...) The first can properly be only a figure of speech; while the second is to mistake what men do for what they ought to do. (shrink)