Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/260

244 veritable summum bonum of the ethical consciousness, means, socially, as what has just been said above would indicate, and as the historian should make a point of remembering, to appeal for help from the professional rigorists and hedonists to the profession of natural science; and it means, personally, to supplement sentiment about duty or pleasure with a careful study of the situation. After all that has been said above, it may not be necessary to say here that science as a profession is to be distinguished from science as a personal experience; but, whether professional or personal, it is study of the conditions of action. Its professional expression may search life more broadly and more deeply; it may be protected by the esprit de corps of the class that has assumed its special labor; and, just because of its greater breadth and depth, and because of its being the standard of a distinct class, it may be slow to get application in real life; but none of these things affects its ultimate use in life or its real relation to life. Personal or socially professional, as was said, it is always scrutiny of the situation; it is study of environment as comprising the conditions of action; and it has an important part in the solution of the problem of conduct.

So are we once more reminded of our definition of ethics: study of the conditions of action with a view to action. If class characters could be taken for wholes of experience, ethics might still keep itself aloof from such study, or resort to such study only in the Mad Hatter's or the analogy-of-religion-to-nature theologian's condescending way; it might be self-contained and self-sufficient in its devotion to its abstract extra-naturalistic ideals, depending for the zest of its pursuits only on the brilliant contests between its two great parties; it might boast itself literally a science of the ideal, a "normative" science, a science with its own peculiar methods and criteria; and its historian might busy himself only with the rigorists here and the hedonists there, as they play at their unending logomachies, in his historical explanations turning to science and to other factors in the contemporary life of society, very much as a would-be poet sometimes uses metaphors, only for their ornamental and hit-or-miss illustrative value; but the class-character never is a whole of experience,