Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/547

531 Some remarks may be made on the method which is concisely described in this paragraph. In the first place, Green recognizes quite clearly that a metaphysical theory of ethics is not a mere deduction from metaphysical principles of a non-ethical kind. It is concerned with the facts of moral experience; these belong to its data; and it has to find a conception which will express their nature and without which their nature cannot be expressed. This seems to me to imply the main thesis for which I have been contending. A metaphysic of ethics must recognize and be based upon the facts of moral experience, just as all metaphysics must be based upon experience generally. Metaphysical reasoning may, however, proceed a certain length without reflecting upon that special aspect of experience which we call moral. Its conceptions are in this case so far incomplete; their incompleteness may, perhaps, be demonstrable without any further widening of our view of experience; but the incompleteness cannot be made good without taking account of the moral aspect of experience which was overlooked,—and may have been legitimately overlooked,—in the earlier stages of the argument.

In the second place, "moral and intellectual experience" are not separate or independent parts of experience. They are aspects of the same experience, and must therefore be taken "conjointly," if we would understand experience as a whole. From this it follows that the characteristics of one aspect of this experience may be expected to exhibit affinities or correspondence with the characteristics of another of its aspects. The facts of intellectual experience will therefore not be irrelevant (or may not be irrelevant) to ethical theory. The conceptions by which,—founding mainly on our "intellectual" experience,—we attempt to interpret the world and our position in it may have a very decided bearing upon ethics. Thus the spiritual or rational interpretation of ultimate good set forth by Green would be impossible,—or, at least, illusory,—if the mechanical theory were accepted as an adequate account of the world and of ourselves. Reflexion on the facts of moral experience will thus lead not merely to an ethical theory; it may also require us to revise our theoretical