Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/135

No. 2.] attacked. The introduction of more detailed intermediate terms, together with a statement of their exact temporal and quantitative relations to each other, fill out the outline. They give us finally a complete whole, constituted by members standing in orderly and consecutive relations to each other.

Just as experiment transforms a brute physical fact into a relatively luminous series of changes, so evolutionary method applied to a moral fact does not leave us either with a mere animal instinct on one side, or with the spiritual categoric imperative on the other. It reveals to us a single continuing process in which both animal instinct and the sense of duty have their place. It puts us in possession of a concrete whole.

The analogy with modern biological interests is significant. There was a time when units of fixed structure seemed alone to have importance. They, by simple physical juxtaposition and combination, were supposed to account for all more complex forms and functions. For logical purposes it makes no difference whether these units are 'cells' with relation to the organism as a whole, or brain 'centers' with reference to certain neural functions. Some peculiar property was supposed to be resident in these units, which somehow controlled or explained other activities and structures. Now, morphology is ceasing to lord it over physiology ; and physiology is ceasing to be a mere matter of certain functions. It is a chemico-physical process operating wherever we have organized structure and the performance of function that is the subject of scientific attention. The problem is to discover and analyze this process, and then trace its different modes of operation as it presents itself under a variety of conditions; these conditions being stated definitely through experimental control. Just as the biologist is surrendering the attempt to locate his reality in one spot rather than another, in the cell as such, or the brain center as such, so the moralist must cease trying to find the key to his problem in the animal instinct as such; and as the biologist has ceased taking a function as ultimate and self-explanatory, so the moralist must cease discussing the refined moral consciousness of civilization as final. He must turn to the moralizing process which operates