Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/248

 232 THE AMERICAN fOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

seed ask of nature what it really is? Who is not enough of a psychologist to detect in every formulated question a movement toward its own answer?

And in another way every real question is a leading ques- tion. Thus it can never have more than a tentative reply. A reply that claimed more than tentative value, than the value of a working hypothesis, would betray its origin most shamefully. Nowhere so fully as in modern science is this principle recog- nized; it belongs to scientific etiquette or morality which should I say ? Yet not in science alone does it impose its responsi- bilities on human thinking. Throughout the length and the breadth of human experience, answers take form only to aid in re-defining the old, old questions. Like oaks, answers are valu- able only because they are not final, but useful, being the means to further life, the instruments of continued inquiry. So is the peren- nial question evidence of real history, not evidence against it.

These three things, then, I have wished to bring to mind at the beginning of this paper : ( i ) the only tentative nature, which is also to say the really historical value, of the answer to any question ; ( 2 ) the seedlike character of every question ; and (3) the intimate dependence at once of all questions, and all answers especially of, What ought to be? and, What is? upon each other. These three things have an important bearing upon the true nature of ethics, and upon the proper way of read- ing or writing the history of ethics.

Turning now to the consideration of the ethical question, the question which ethical theory has always sought to answer, from among the philosophical questions already given here our selection is easy. Thus, personally, what ought I to do? Or, more objectively, man being what he is, what ought man to do? What is the ideal life of a human being? Such is the ethical question, and it sounds, and often it has been interpreted, as an inquiry for something quite apart from what is, from what is manifest and actual. With a meaning that to me has never been altogether intelligible, although I remember for a time to have received it as somehow highly edifying, ethics is often called a "normative" science. It is not an "objective" science, the con-