Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/88

72 In conclusion it must be said that the volumes lose much of their possible value for the scholar by reason of the almost innumerable errors in the references to authorities.

Both these works deal in effect with the topics that are usually dealt with in the introduction to a treatise on ethics,—the character, scope, and method of the science. Such methodological discussions have a keen interest of their own, but it is an interest which must be admitted to be of a rather limited, subtle, and technical kind. It is not a direct interest in the matter of the science, but a secondary or reflective interest in its form. Probably the student would lose very little, he might even gain a good deal, if 'introductions' were either omitted altogether, or relegated to the position of the 'postscript which should have been a preface.' Abstract discussions of method are all very well, if they are undertaken from an interest in logical system and principle. But if they are undertaken, not in the interest of logical reflection upon a science already so far constructed, but in the direct interest of scientific construction itself, then it is very desirable they should be as brief as possible, for after all the best way by far of proving how a science should be made is to make it. "The constant whetting of the knife is tedious, if it is not proposed to cut anything with it." The works before us seem to me to illustrate, each in its own way, the truth of this saying and the dangers of such abstract preliminary discussion. They are far too long, diffuse, and over-elaborated. They expand into a volume what could have been said in a few introductory chapters, and what would, besides, have been said with far more effect, if there had been any substantive and constructive work behind it.

M. Lévy-Bruhl's book is an elaborate argument for the Comtian position that ethics must be based on historical sociology, that a rational art of social practice must be dependent upon a previous science of social laws. Of course even this previous science has yet to be constructed. Regarded simply as an academic exposition and defence of a particular philosophical position, the book has conspicuous merits. It is always clear and straightforward in style, careful