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 344 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

the first view that strikes us which is necessarily superficial and onesided. Its opposite is the concrete idea, which in turn is not what first occurs to us, but is further away and is only to be reached by a gift of insight, as in the case of the old woman, or as in the case of most of us by a strenuous effort of comprehen- sive thought. Employed as descriptions of different species of ethics we shall call that kind abstract which is in such a hurry to be practical that it turns in distaste from the labor of impartial thinking, and is content with seeing human life in a light which may be as narrow and one-sided as you please, so long as it affords justification for energetic action. That ethics, on the other hand, is concrete which is determined at all costs to understand before it undertakes and is content to postpone practical results in favor of a clear and comprehensive view of the end that it is sought to attain. It remains to be shown that the latter kind instead of being hostile to practice is really, and in the long run, the more practical of the two.

But before attempting to show this, let us ask, secondly, in what sense we are to take the word "practical." What is meant by "practical ethics?" The sense that is in the mind of our critic is clear. Practical ethics are ethics which lay down some practical end as a moral duty and exhort to its pursuit. But this overlooks the fact that such ends may be practical in a twofold sense. They may be practical in the sense that they are proposed as aims of conduct. In this sense any idea may be practical. Any idea may be made a motive of action. I have an idea of a world in which everyone is rich and happy, and this idea may become practical in being made an end of action. But clearly amongst such ends there will be a difference between those that are really practical and those which are not, between those that we are justified in believ- ing will be realized and those which never can be. However active and enthusiastic a man might be in pursuit of the latter kind, it would require a stretch of language to call him a practical man. The conclusion is that by practical ethics we ought to mean not simply the ethics which exhorts to practice, but the ethics