Page:Philosophical Review Volume 12.djvu/663

No. 6.] other unforeseen conditions may upset all his calculations. His problem is too complex for absolutely accurate mathematical treatment, and yet, in spite of this lack of mathematical precision in economic matters, there is a science of economics. What makes a study scientific is not so much the mathematical accuracy of its formulæ, as the method in which it is conducted. Now scientific ethics is scientific, as scientific economics is. It discovers certain laws, but cannot claim upon the basis of these laws to predict the moral future of mankind. These laws express general tendencies, and the knowledge of them serves to make actual morality much more intelligible.

V. We must now take a brief glance at the claim often made that ethics is a branch of philosophy, not a science. A thorough examination of this claim would necessitate the raising of questions as to the nature, tasks, and method of philosophy which we cannot attempt to answer here. For instance, before giving any adequate and satisfactory answer to the question whether ethics is a science or a part of philosophy, it would be necessary to ask whether science and philosophy are mutually exclusive, as the question would seem to assume. Is philosophy non-scientific, and is science non-philosophical? Various answers have been given to these questions, but it would require too much space here to discuss them and to justify ourselves in the selection of some one answer as preferable to the others. Whether there may be a valid philosophical ethics, and whether, if there be, its contents differ from those of a scientific ethics, and how its methods are different from those pursued by scientific ethics,—all these questions must be passed over, as requiring more space than is available here for their discussion. This article is written in the belief that when a satisfactory delimitation of the spheres of science and philosophy is made, the two will be found to have more points of connection than is commonly supposed; and yet that ethics will be found on the scientific rather than on the philosophical side of the boundary line. For all the data which the science of ethics must describe, organize, and explain are empirical data of the same order as the data of the other special sciences. The ethicist takes these data