Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/344

330 universe, other than that which is formed in the experiment itself,—may have come into being by the uniting of oxygen and hydrogen. The experiment shows us the analysis of water and a simple mode of compounding it; not the actual mode of production,—whether we call it 'genetic' or 'historical,'—of all existing water. On the whole, we must, I think, conclude that the experimental method, while perfectly applicable to problems of genesis, is not distinctly a genetic method. Proceeding to the subject of ethical research, Professor Dewey announces his thesis: "I shall endeavor to point out that there is more than an analogy, there is an exact identity, between what the experimental method does for our physical knowledge, and what the historical method in a narrower sense may do for the spiritual region: the region of conscious values" (p. 113). In this connection he gives what appears to me to be a true and luminous account of the application of the evolutionary method to ethics. But there occur occasional statements, leading to the above thesis, which seem somewhat exaggerated. "The early periods present us in their relative crudeness and simplicity with a substitute for the artificial operation of an experiment." Surely this is true only with most important reservations. In physical research we exclude complications as unessential; we are justified in abstraction. But in the organism, and especially in society, the complexity is all-important. Just what we cannot tolerate in ethics is over-simplification; and this has hitherto been a chief crime of evolutionary moralists. "Following the phenomenon into the complicated and refined form which it assumes later, is a substitute for the synthesis of the experiment." But the synthesis of the experiment is either only a mere check upon the analysis, or it is a novel combination, motived only by analogies or incomplete inductions. But in evolutionary research "following the phenomenon" is the main thing,—the observation of influences from countless sources, not a mere shifting of the elements discovered in the relatively simple analysis. From the point of view of method, if not of formal logic, it is one thing to note the results of an intended and controlled combination of elements, and a radically different thing to trace the course of concrete history,—the conflicting results of infinitely complex and uncontrolled forces, only gradually coming into view in the advance of the investigation.

However, when all reservations are made, we must finally admit both that the historical method is perfectly applicable to ethical inquiry and that the simplicity of early social forms permits of