Page:Philosophical Review Volume 12.djvu/647

No. 6.] knowledge—the art of thinking—was mistakenly confused with a knowledge of the principles controlling that object, i. e., with the science of logic.

A mistake of this sort is at work in the minds of those who define ethics as the art of correct conduct. Morality is such an art, in which various persons are more or less proficient. Some moral lives have the high æsthetic finish of an exquisite poem, others the massive grandeur of a noble pile of masonry, while unfortunately too many are comparable only to ribald verse or meretricious architecture. When we speak of a man's weaving the web of his own character, of his hewing it out of unpromising material, of his refining it in the fire of adversity, and so forth, we are saying that life is an art, character an art-product, virtue an art-quality.

But this is no reason why ethics should be an art, any more than the fact that poetry is an art makes an art of poetics. Ethics bears the same relation to the moral life that poetics bears to poetic activity and poetic product. Ethics is the science of the principles of an art; it is a systematized knowledge of the ways in which a certain kind of art-activity is carried on, of the reasons why the results of that activity produce certain effects, in short, of the various relations in which a particular art-activity and art-product stand. Morality is an empirical fact having various bearings; the moral man and the immoral man are phenomena of every-day life, and are as amenable to scientific investigation as are poems and financial movements, chemical reactions and mechanical operations. There are many questions which the experienced existence of morality and immorality challenges us to answer if we can. Ethics, in its widest sense, is the name given to any systematic attempt to answer these questions. Such answers do not constitute an art but a more or less complete science.

II. The question has been much discussed whether ethics is a descriptive science. The majority of writers on ethics have considered it not descriptive, but normative; some have admitted the presence of a descriptive feature in ethics, but have recognized along with this a large independent mass of normative