Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/247

 ETHICS AND ITS HISTORY 231

reflected upon to the appreciation of its full meaning-; to the appreciation, for example, of the intimacy between, What ought to be? and, What really is? If, however, it serves here only to strengthen the idea that every question is more than its manifest, articulated form, enough has been said. Of much more impor- tance is the following. If the real question be indeed a living experience, in which, as was said, all the interests of the inquirer are moving with power, then, in a certain very significant way, every question must determine its answer. An answer cannot be external to a real question or, more fully, to the condi- tions under which the real question has been asked. In short, the real question is necessarily what is known as a "leading" question; for the conditions of its putting determine its reply. Two and two equal what? Given certain equations containing x and y, what are the values of x and y ? Here, very obviously, we have leading questions ; they are leading " to a degree ;" but they are not different in kind from all others. I was once in the class of a good old German pedagogue, whose questions were often only German sentences with the rising inflection at the end in place of the auxiliary verb. The pupil was allowed to reply by supplying the verb ; in German not a very difficult mat- ter. Sunday-school instruction is often as childlike. Still, except for the needlessly light exercise required of the pupils in these cases, the method is pedagogically and psychologically sound. In our modern laboratories those who put questions to nature do so only by arranging their experiments in such a way that the answer is bound to come out of the conditions of the inquisitive experimentation, not out of the proverbial clear sky. Neither the worst of pedagogues nor the feeblest of investigators makes inquiries about the price of wheat, given the cost per dozen of Florida oranges; nor about the effect of gravity on a pound of feathers, granted the logical correctness of Descartes' famous argument for the existence of God. Even their questions are leading questions, having in themselves, as they are formulated, the answers always determined, although, of course, not fully worked out. Answers spring from questions very much as oaks from acorns. Who is not enough of a poet to hear the buried