Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/342



to recall the reader's attention to the two essays on Evolutionary Method and Morality, published by Professor John Dewey in this, in March and July, 1902. The object of the first paper is to show that scientific ethics is possible only by that method. Two distinct propositions are thus involved: first, that the method in question is applicable to the treatment of ethical problems; and, secondly, that apart from this method no scientific ethics is possible. To the establishment of the first proposition, the whole paper is really devoted. For the second, no evidence is anywhere offered,—except, indeed, a direct appeal to the scientific experience of the reader. Yet it is this second proposition that gives the essay its sub-title. Professor Dewey prefaces the discussion with a consideration of the claims of the experimental method to rank as essentially genetic. The essence of the experimental method is said to be "control of the analysis or interpretation of any phenomenon by bringing to light the exact conditions, and the only conditions, which are involved in its coming into being." This fact, it is said, is hardly warrant for holding it to be in a true sense historical or evolutionary; in the first place, because the historical series is unique both in itself and in its context, while the terms with which experiment deals occur and recur without essential change in the dislocation; and, in the second place, because the main interest in experimental science is not in the individual case but in the more general results that at once emerge. But if not strictly historical, the experimental method is yet truly genetic; and, indeed, the distinction is due to a mere abstraction for our own ends. The serial order, with which experiment deals, is perfectly individual; but, since our ends are general, we can have substitution without loss.

Is it true that the experimental method aims at bringing to light the sole and sufficient conditions of the genesis of a phenomenon? Prima facie the very opposite is true. The course of an experiment is the natural sequence of cause and effect. It is the causes that are