  Yet his imagination could also be less modest: a gaggle of moral philosophers is trapped beneath the earth in a smoke-filled chamber; they talk at cross purposes, and refuse to take the way out into the open air that he alone has discovered. It was his ambition to have united elements from Aristotle, Kant, and Mill in a logically cogent way that solved the fundamental problems of ethics (though leaving unfinished business), and he usually believed himself to have achieved this. For much of his career, his “prescriptivism” formed an important part of the curriculum, certainly in Britain. His disappointment was not to have persuaded others (an occasional “we prescriptivists” was always uncertain of reference), and to have left no disciples; he once told John Lucas that this made his life a failure. Yet he leaves behind generations of pupils grateful for the transmission not of a doctrine but of a discipline; and posterity, while unlikely to ratify the logical validity of his theory, will have reason to admire it for its uniting of apparent opposites, freedom and reason, tradition and rationalism, eclecticism and rigor.