Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/137

No. 2.] continuity of process with identity of content. The following quotation illustrates the error to which I refer: "We may raise the single inductive inquiry, What acts have men everywhere and at all times considered right or wrong respectively, and what acts have some considered right or indifferent and others wrong? Tables of agreement and difference can be drawn up to show what mankind at least has regarded as the essential content of the moral law. ... For the rich harvest which this treatment of the moral field is sure to yield, we shall have to wait until the spirit of science has exorcised the spirit of speculation from our contending schools of ethics" (Schurman, The Ethical Import of Darwinism, pp. 205, 206). "The science of historical ethics is still too young to have established what moral principles are ultimate and fundamental—that is, what principles man everywhere and at all times has considered binding" (Ibid., p. 255).

The implication of the quotations is that the scientific method is concerned with the abstraction of a certain common and unchanging content that it is on the lookout for some duty or duties that have been regarded at all times and in all places as equally binding. I seize upon this conception because it is sufficiently near the proposition just presented to make it worth while to indicate the difference between them. I have insisted that the scientific method is concerned with the discovery of a common and continuous process, and that this can be determined only historically. The notion now propounded is that science is concerned with a common content or structure of beliefs, and this can be apprehended historically. I do not find, however, that it is identity of content which is important, either theoretically or practically. On the contrary, the method of comparison and abstraction which leaves us with simply a fixed common element apart from all diversity and variety, gives a mere caput mortuum, rigidly static, arbitrary, a residuum without explanation. Practically, it gives us no leverage for what is the most important thing—control. Doubtless it is true that other historical sciences have passed through a 'comparative' period in which the discovery of a common element of structure was taken to be the object of search;