Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/690

 674 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

edgment of greater and higher ends, and perhaps it may itself be swallowed up by them. The new ends may be connected with the original ends either by similarity or by a causal relation, or by mere propinquity.

This concatenation of means with ends and of ends with other ends is in great measure due to the social life and its institutions. By means of these the individual who wills something is drawn into a great process through which a whole series of transformations may arise. When such a transformation has taken place, ethical ideals and aims are not the same as before. New ethical formations have been produced through the continual social processes. It is the task of sociology to show us the conditions to which these transforma- tions are due, and it is the task of ethics to give form to the new ideals and discover the direct paths. Ethics has to develop the con- sequences of the new standpoint. All ethics has so far an empirical character. Every step of evolution has its own ethics, and the ethics of one period cannot be deduced from that of the preceding one without knowledge of the whole intermediate social and psy- chical evolution.

The relation of sociology to ethics is here again similar to the relation of psychology to ethics. The ethically right must be psychologically possible, and there may be psychological continuity, though from an ethical point of view it must be admitted that a new movement has been initiated.

3. Though ethics is more specialized than sociology, and though it is in essential points dependent on sociology, yet it is an inde- pendent science. This independence manifests itself in the fact that social data, the results of historical development, are the objects for ethical valuation. In ethics these data and results are examined in their relation to an ideal, a standard ; and their value depends on their harmonic or inharmonic relation to this ideal. The main diffi- culty of all ethics consists in the establishment of the ideal which is to give the standard of valuation. The great struggle between ethical systems concerns this establishment. Ethics has here problems which sociology, as such, as a purely descriptive and causal science, does not know. Sociology looks backward to discover the course and the laws of social evolution. Sociology comes after reality. A social process must be to a certain degree finished, before its law can be determined. We may say of sociology, what Hegel has saJd unjustly of philosophy in general, that the bird of Athene first begins