Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/249

 ETHICS AND ITS HISTORY 233

tention runs ; it is not a truly " scientific " science. Ethics would grasp the ideal of another world, not the real of this; it has a causation all its own; a living creature that is absolutely sui generis; even a validity that rests ultimately on emotion rather than on reason, perhaps on spiritual emotion, perhaps if there be any difference, and this if is a point frequently in controversy on the emotions of sense; and, besides all these, ethics has had other peculiarities too numerous to mention. But, after all has been said, the fact stands out, I think, that the real appeal of all ethical inquiry has been sooner or later to the world of the actual ; or say, rather, to the sciences giving report of that world and of its laws, chiefly, no doubt, to the anthropological sciences, notably psychology, yet in some measure to all the sciences, even to physics and astronomy; and for my part it is hard to see where else ethical inquiry should go or could go. Surely, if life's questions are dependent on each other, What is? and, What ought to be? among the rest; and if, again, any real question is a leading one, having its answer in the actual conditions that have given it rise, any other appeal would be unnatural. And on most general principles it simply passes my comprehension how what is ideal can ever be known except through the evidence of what is actual. Can one's moral life be anything more than one's real life? Can there be any ought in life that is not true to the conditions of life, to what is in life? If so, then, among other things, the use that ethical inquirers in the past have undoubtedly made, although often with much parade of conde- scension, of the objective sciences is only one more sign in quarters where, if anywhere, it would and should be least expected of man's remarkable capacity for going wrong.

Yet here somebody objects vigorously that, in spite of ethics' use of the objective sciences, its history in general is far from warranting the assertion of its real dependence on them. Ethics in history has always been, the objector declares, a search after the summum bonum, a discussion of such things save the mark! as duty, pleasure, happiness, freedom, and the like; and its occasional use of the objective sciences has been only like the Mad Hatter's use of figures to show what was to be proved,