Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/660

 644 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

conditioning of which can be investigated. This justifies the existence of a special science of human valuings to study their rise, to compare them with each other, to formulate out of the elements furnished by experience a more and more adequate con- cept of them in their harmony and completeness, and in the light of experience to distinguish those forms of conduct which are promotive of human values from those that destroy, disorganize, and degrade life by preventing the realization of such value- phenomena.

If the laws of conduct thus derived were subject to higher laws involved in a nature-of-things not revealed in human experience, then, if anybody could by any possibility get at the content of such absolute laws, they would be superior to the laws prescribing the conduct conducive to human experience-values. The latter would be only laws for the attainment of a part which is subject to the greater whole, just as the so-called laws of political economy, in so far as they are guides to conduct, are subject to ethical laws. As economics is a science of a part, so the science of human experience-values would then be a science of a part, yet a true science, since human experience-values are a distinct kind of phenomena rising from a special complexus of conditioning. And we do not admit that any other values of which they can be a part is discoverable to human intelligence, but maintain that the whole harmony of values realizable in human experience is the highest and largest end that can be formulated by human intelligence for the guidance of human action; that ethics is the formulation of that concept and discovery of the method of the conditioning of those values.

If this be true, or even if it be true that the human experience- values, though subordinate to some world-end, are yet proper objects of science, and our knowledge of them founded upon observation and inference, then any trustworthy concept of pos- sible values must be an induction from knowledge of that which already has been, though the induction may outrun all that ever was in any single instance, gathering elements from the widest observation, and inferring the possibility of new combinations from knowledge of fragmentary realizations. The thought of the