Page:Philosophical Review Volume 12.djvu/658

642 deserving can be helped without flooding the community with paupers. Sympathy for the victim of unscrupulous lust may give place to an indifference for female virtue. The evil of stoning every adultress must be removed, not by ignoring the adultery, but by devising some way that shall make it possible for the woman to go and sin no more. And knowledge of human nature and human conditions is indispensable for securing this consummation. This knowledge systematized is a part of ethics—it may be not of any ethics yet actualized, but of that ideal ethics for the realization of which every ethical scientist works. For it must be remembered that ethics, like every other science, is imperfect. We know only in part, but we strive toward the day when that which is perfect shall come and that which is in part shall be done away. This is the unattainable ideal of every science. The imperfection of science is its incentive, not its despair.

Ethics, therefore, is to be reckoned, both on the ground of its actual achievement, and more especially on the ground of its prospective accomplishment, as a practical science, though as science it is theoretical through and through. This combination of the theoretical and the practical in the character of the science gives rise to the question, In what spirit should it be prosecuted? Shall we study ethics out of intellectual curiosity or for its utility? The answer is that there is no necessary incompatibility in the two motives. They become incompatible only if an inordinate desire to turn our knowledge to practical use leads to undue haste in observation and generalization, and to lack of scientific caution generally. What makes knowledge scientific is not this or that motive which prompts to its acquisition. It is method, not motive, that counts. A man is no less of a scientific ethicist, even if he pursues his study mainly because thereby he can support his family and keep his own body and soul together—provided only he works with scientific caution in gathering and sifting his materials and in his generalizations. There is danger always that an extrinsic interest in a scientific subject may impair the integrity of scientific method. Hence the man who pursues a science merely because he hungers and thirsts after knowledge