Page:Philosophical Review Volume 20.djvu/115

101 with the functions of gravity and electricity. Similarly in psycho-physiology gravity can be substituted for affection and electricity for representation. These hypotheses of a scientific philosophy are to be distinguished from the creations of an uncontrolled imagination in that they are tried out in science, and in that they are no more arbitrary than the facts warrant.

The spread of positivism seems to involve the giving up of the traditional ethical conceptions of duty, the good, obligation, and moral sanction. Current sociological ethics is essentially descriptive. The task of the moralist, according to this school, is not to make men better, in any absolute sense, but to point out to them certain types of action, which are nothing more than generalizations of human experience. The old ethics was prescriptive and based upon an essentially rational order with God as its final cause. This ethics was individual, deductive, and normative. Reasoning from the true nature of man, it addressed itself to the individual conscience. The new ethics, expressly rejecting all metaphysical and religious considerations, is primarily inductive. Occupying itself exclusively with the generalization and systematization of customs and usages, it must, in the nature of the case, dispense with real duties. It then becomes sociology rather than ethics. For this inductive, empirical ethics, the distinction between good and evil resides in the idea, not in the facts. Obligation becomes merely the recognition of the utility of conforming to a mean type. The objections against the older ethics may be best met by giving of it a definition as precise, philosophical, and scientific as possible. From the point of view of the older ethics, reality is too rich to be confined within the set formulæ of positive science. Aside from relations of existences, there are relations of value. Over and above the dialectic of science is a dialectic of art, morals, and religion. Reason attains a knowledge of this order of values through a spontaneous intuition of the qualitative connections of things. This intuition or perception being of a very general character, our particular evaluations are often erroneous. Variations in moral practice do not argue against an absolute and universal ethics, but merely indicate that it is only gradually that man learns to judge of values with precision. However dependent on experience, the determination of particular values belongs peculiarly to reason. Inductive procedure here becomes nonsense. To explain the moral order we must refer back to God, the source of both existence and value. The progressive recognition of the qualitative relations which exist in the divine order constitutes all ethical evaluation and puts our intelligence into accord with that of the Creator. The ethics which comports with human nature is respect for order rendered moral by the action of a free will. To this specifically ethical conception, religion adds that of a divine commandment to be executed. All the great ideas of ethics follow logically from the recognition of the value of things.