Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/635

No. 6.] a variety of normal obligations" (p. 415). Perhaps it may seem hypercritical to say that such a sentence is not calculated to economize the reader's attention, but in a work of over 600 pp. this economy is a thing to be fervently desired.

My other general remarks relate to the scheme of division adopted in the work. I think this scheme is by no means so simple or satisfactory as it may appear at first sight. The threefold division of the work corresponds, according to Professor Ladd, broadly, though not rigidly (p. 32), to a distinction of three methods of studying morality: the psychological, the historical or objective, and the metaphysical. Now, as to the psychological method and the psychological division, of ethics, there need not be much difficulty; the adjective marks out pretty clearly what is meant. And the question whether or not we are to include psychological discussions within the sphere of ethics proper, is mainly one of terminology and convenience. Professor Ladd goes so far as to contend that the psychological method is essential for any successful study of ethics; but his argument, it seems to me, is not free from confusion. "In the case of ethics especially," he says, for instance, "how shall its problems be understood, or how shall any conclusions concerning them which have even the aspect, not to say the essence, of morality be reached, unless the soul interpret the data of facts into terms of its own experience? ... In general the results which words and things significant of 'right' or 'rights,' of 'duty' and 'obligation,' of consequences of 'pain ' or 'pleasure,' of 'interest' and 'utility'—and whatever other words or things the study of ethics may acquaint us with—shall have to contribute toward an ethical science or a philosophy of morals, can only be determined by a process of interpretation. Data of ethics are no more data of ethics than are the movements of the stars in their courses ... unless they are rendered into facts and laws of consciousness by the mind trained in psychology" (pp. 23-24). Now it is of course obvious: (1) that any moral action can be fully intelligible only to one who is a moral person and moral in the same degree; and (2) that a scientific study of morality will interpret and express moral facts with greater exactness than the plain man uses. But it is merely a confusion to represent this superior exactness of ethical science as an exactness of psychological analysis. On the contrary, it is of course primarily an exactness of ethical analysis. The exact determination of the nature of 'right' or 'rights,' of 'duty' and 'obligation,' is a task in which the moralist will scarcely be helped by any sort of psychological analysis, unless the term 'psychological analysis' is to be used to cover any analysis whatever of any fact of