Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/194

176 Circumscribed objectively in this fashion many of our daily actions are to be classed as non-moral; life does not seem to gain or to lose by our fingering this object rather than that, by our turning up one street rather than another. On the other hand, whenever life-consequences are present the conduct whether of mollusc or man is to be classed as moral experience. Such biologically important consequences I shall henceforth allude to as the life projection-values of an act. After this initial separation of the moral from the non-moral, the biological method solves the further problem of the separation of the moral from the immoral by calling whatever ministers to life good, whatever thwarts life evil. Sentimentalizing discussion of the immorality of, say, drunkenness or social vice is to be replaced by a rational discussion of their life projection-values.

The services the biological method has rendered ethics are many. It has done much for the development of anthropological ethics. Enlisting the services of the physical and natural sciences, it has put the whole question of immorality on a sounder basis. In a more subjective method the distinctions often run, like cheap colors; here they seem firmly set. The problem of defining moral experience in a satisfactory manner seems solved. But the assurance may be hasty, and the biological method may contain difficulties and implications of no slight proportions. In the first place the distinction between vital and non-vital activities demands incessant reconstruction with every step of lessening ignorance of remote effects and intricate relations. Logically carried out, this would lead to the disappearance of the whole sphere of the non-moral. Omniscience would cause its collapse. In the second place, the centralizing concept of life, if it is to stand the strain to which the constructive moralist puts it, must be built on the assumption of an inherent purposiveness of the evolutional process. In one sense purpose and inherent design are quite as characteristic of the Spencerian system of nature as they are of the Stoic. Define life as the wild, irrational seething of a will to live with no purposive side to its mass of straining forces, and there is little scope for the construction of ethical values. At best, and then only at the cost