Page:Philosophical Review Volume 13.djvu/388

374 of the associational psychologists. It is based upon resemblances observed between objects of sense. Telesio carries his naturalism into ethics also. The only end which man can pursue is his self-preservation, and therefore virtue and vice are intellectual merely. The influence of Telesio was felt mainly through Campanella and Bacon.

The question as to the relations of ethics and metaphysics may be put in two ways: (1) Are the ethical doctrines taught by the more important writers derived from their respective metaphysical beliefs? Or (2) in abstracto, is the subject-matter of moral science of such a kind that it is necessarily affected by our belief as to the ultimate nature of man and the universe? Taking up the first form, we may say with certainty that a great body of thinkers do base their ethics directly upon their metaphysics. Others are popularly regarded as reaching their ethical results by other roads than the metaphysical, especially Kant, Spencer, Mill, and the English moralists of the eighteenth century. But Kant's ethical and metaphysical doctrines are in reality completely interdependent; it is the same reason which as self-determining is practical, and as determined is speculative, and the unconditioned causality which the former gives in moral freedom is necessary for the systematic unity demanded, but not supplied by the latter. Spencer states definitely that the object of moral science is to deduce from the laws of life and the conditions of existence what kinds of action tend to produce happiness. The popular impression that his ethics is independent of metaphysical ideas is caused by his careless use of utilitarian language. As for Mill, his utilitarianism is confessedly based on the belief that men desire nothing but happiness, that this is a collective happiness, and has a concrete intelligible nature. It is true that the English moralists of the eighteenth century employed no philosophical theories, but this was because their attention was confined to the facts of moral approval and disapproval, and epistemological difficulties were avoided by recourse to moral faculty or feeling. The truth in the contention that ethics is independent of metaphysics is simply that our knowledge of ultimate reality is not yet complete enough to enable us to deduce an answer for every particular problem of detail. We must have a moral code, yet such a code cannot be entirely haphazard. Ethical theory must be in some way coordinated with speculative, since both deal with the same universe.

The lack of clear exposition in Renouvier's Science de la morale has caused its importance to be overlooked. Though some of its problems