Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/695

 RELATION BETWEEN SOCIOLOGY AND ETHICS 679

consists in its power to support and nourish a rich personal life in great groups of individuals, and only through the study of what is going on in each group is the construction of this concept possible.

For Wundt and Hegel sociology and ethics are ultimately iden- tical a consequence of the absolute subordination of the individual point of view to the social. The same may be said of Auguste Comte in the first period of his philosophizing. In his Cours de philosophie positive he did not regard ethics as an independent science which has its special place in the series of the sciences ; ethi- cal ideas are here to be found partly in the biological, partly in the sociological, chapters of his work. But later in life Comte regarded ethics as an independent science, the seventh and last in the series of the fundamental sciences. The principle on which Comte arranged the sciences in a series was that the following science shall always be more concrete in its object and more inductive in its method than the preceding. When, then, in his later work he puts ethics after sociology, he presupposes that ethics is the more concrete and induct- ive science of the two. Now, Comte's reason for this view is that in sociology the individual motives and tendencies neutralize one another; it is the average results which are of sociological impor- tance ; while in ethics the character and the tendency of the inner life and the individual realities in their multiplicity have the first place.

I do not myself believe that Comte deduced all the consequences of the position which he finally assigned to ethics, nor that he gave a complete concept of the relation between the individual and the social points of view in ethics ; but he points in the right direction. It is the strength, but it is also the weakness, of ethics that it is the most concrete of all sciences. It stands almost at the boundary between science and art. To conduct life ethically is the greatest of all arts. And, like all arts, it develops itself spontaneously. All that theory can do at first is to learn from this spontaneous development, to find its moving forces, and to formulate the thoughts which it pre- supposes.

Later on, the art can be exercised with greater consciousness, and there can then be an interaction between thought and life. And such an interaction cannot be established if ethics does not the differences in point of view notwithstanding remain in indebted- ness both to sociology and to psychology.