Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/538

522 merely scientific interest. If knowledge is its object, it is yet knowledge of the Good, and such a knowledge of it as will enable us to distinguish good from evil. History must go beyond history, analysis of mental states must become reflexion on their significance, before this knowledge can be intelligently sought. Descriptive ethics may pursue its way regardless of metaphysics so long as it keeps to its own proper task of describing men's ideas about goodness and the outward forms which express or determine these ideas. So long but no longer. As soon as the attempt is made to say what things are good, or to distinguish between the goodness of different ends, the problem of validity is substituted for the problem of origin and history, and the descriptive moralist becomes, in spite of himself, a philosophical moralist. He treats ethical ideas not merely as facts with a history, but as conceptions whose valid application requires to be determined.

That ethics has to understand and interpret these conceptions, and not merely to trace their genesis and operation, I start by assuming. In metaphysics also, it will be admitted, we deal with conceptions which we try to understand and interpret. No merely introductory discussion can be expected to establish a satisfactory definition either of metaphysics or of ethics; that must depend on the issue of the whole inquiry. But a preliminary view of the scope of each may be arrived at if we take account of the interest which determines its study. In ethics the object of our inquiry is to know what is good, and to arrive at as comprehensive an account as possible of the ground on which its goodness rests, or of the criterion by which it is known. Ethics may therefore be called the general theory of goodness. Metaphysics, on the other hand, arises from the desire to obtain a comprehensive view of reality, or of experience, as a whole,—to find, if it be possible, the principle of unity in things, and at the same time to understand the principle of their distinction. We may, therefore, describe it as the general theory of reality. The implications of these two definitions will be very variously interpreted. But they might serve as a first and very general description of almost any system of ethics and of almost any system of metaphysics.