Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/604

588 as do the influences of soil and sunshine, wind and water, to the functions of plant life,—limiting, determining conditions, but not constitutive.

The field of investigation being thus narrowed, the all-important problems that remain are those of method, which we may perhaps conveniently separate as belonging to a fifth stage of the discussion. Among the many arguments which are directed against the employment of the genetic method in ethics, we find three most widely influential. The first we meet with in Huxley's lecture. Students who are investigating the evolution of the moral sentiments are on the wrong track, he says, for the immoral sentiments have no less evolved, and have thus as strong a natural precedent as the others. It is apparent that the argument holds only against the crudest imitational ethics, and is without point when urged against any theory which is past looking to nature for a precedent for morality. The second argument claims that evolutionary ethics makes success the sole criterion of merit, which is a brutalizing doctrine, false to the direct testimony of the moral consciousness. Many of our noblest heroes have gone down with a lost cause. Now this objection applies, if anywhere, only to the various systems of biological ethics. For it means only that, when the attempt is made to express moral facts in terms derived from the theory of organic evolution, such terms as 'adaptation' and 'survival' are pushed far beyond the limits of usefulness. But this is nothing against the genetic method. Those who employ that method are not limited to any single criterion of goodness. They may make use of any criterion that is found anywhere in the common consciousness. On the other hand, though in the particular instance success cannot be considered a sufficient criterion of goodness, nevertheless the case is different with the persistence of a moral sentiment in society. It is a grave mistake to suppose that such persistence is independent of any relation to the common welfare,—yes, even to physical and economic welfare.

The third argument, which still appeals to some distinguished thinkers, is based upon what Wundt calls the 'principle of subjective judgment.' We can understand the sentiments and