Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/546

532 of the modern age must read the book of experience, and that only, but he must read it aright.

Constant insistence upon the necessity of taking account of 'experience,' however, is in danger of becoming meaningless, if it be not made plain what 'experience' must mean for modern ethics. If ethics is to achieve the status of a real science, it can do so only by vindicating the significance of its special point of view. It cannot borrow its categories wholesale from psychology or anthropology, without re-interpreting them with reference to its own problems. The moralist may say with Molière: "Je prends mon bien où je le trouve," but he can call his method his own only when he has realized the essential character of his problem, which distinguishes it from that of the anthropologist proper. And that essential character consists in what may be called the philosophical nature of all ethical questions. The mere collecting of facts about human conduct may yield an encyclopedia of interesting observations; but it can never yield a science of ethics. An interpretation of the facts of human conduct in accordance with valid ethical categories is possible only when the universal character of all morality is realized. In the everyday struggles and aspirations of prosaic men and women, the penetrating student of ethics should be able to perceive the ideal conception of the unactualized but none the less real ethical goal. Mere brute actuality is by no means the criterion of significance in a discipline as distinctly normative as ethics. Man's highest ideals are not the less true, nor their demands the less imperative, just because the everyday record of actual accomplishment falls short of the mark. Ars longa, vita brevis. Any adequate study of man's moral progress is sure to reveal an unmistakable striving towards an as yet unachieved ideal. The imperative moral Trieb in that direction is what the 'absolute ought' in Kant's ethics really means, when stripped of its formal garb. And here, it seems to me, Schopenhauer, while admittedly right in criticising Kant's altogether too abstract method, utterly fails to catch the real spirit of Kant's 'imperative' ethics. The appreciation of ethical values, which lifts man to an ever rising level of moral excellence, is not a slave's hope of