Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/370

354 should follow my artistic bent, even if it interferes with existing filial relations," is correct.

Now, ethical science is primarily concerned with problems of validity in the latter sense. It belongs to logic, to the theory of points of view, the categories, and of the methods that develop these points of view, to discuss the validity of morality über-haupt. The scientist as such is not directly concerned with matters of ultimate validity; neither, however, is he taken up with mere presented facts. His fundamental and interesting problem is that of ways of passing upon questions of specific validity; ways of determining the respective values of this or that particular judgment. The extent to which philosophical writers adopt and repeat the propositions of empirical writers, developed before objective science had made much headway, is surprising. It is not bare description of given facts that constitutes the work of the scientist; but discovering, testing, and elaborating adequate modes of finding out what is really given; adequate modes of describing and defining what is thus laid bare. This ought to be too trivial, too commonplace to mention, but current arguments against the use of historical methods in ethics indicate the need not only of mention but of stress. The opponent argues thus: It is of course true that morality has a history; that is, we can trace different moral practices, beliefs, customs, demands, opinions, in various forms of outward manifestation. We can say that here such and such moral practices obtained, and then gave way in this point or that. This indeed is a branch of history, and an interesting one. As history it is mere truism to say that it will receive scientific treatment just in the degree in which all the resources of historic method are called into action. But when this is said and done the result remains history, not ethics. What ethics deals with is the moral worth of these various practices, beliefs, etc.; and this question of worth is a totally different matter from existence in a temporal series, and from the accurate description of serial order. The historian of ethics can at most supply only data; the distinctive work of the ethical writer is still all to be done. And we may imagine the objector going on to add the stock phrases: History