Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/197

179 psychological interpretation of moral experience with its endless study of descriptive complications does not favor such a constructive program; its only logical role would be one of caution against hasty or excessive construction. If by this is meant the practical caution and sound judgment of a careful investor, nothing could be said against it; but it is something else: a logical impulse working itself loose, running wild and more often than not changing to an insistently idle curiosity. The second proposed defense is this. The study of individual variations beyond a certain point yields no scientific results. This is true of any scientific investigation. Of course, the point recedes as the assimilative power of the science increases, but it may be defined as not lying beyond the line at which further recognition of analytic and variational factors would mean the surrender of the point of view of the science.

The third interpretation of moral experience I shall take the liberty of calling the auto-ideological interpretation. Historically it has appeared in many different forms, and its relations to the other methods are by no means constant. In one sense biological ethics is teleological: life is read as a purposive process aimed at its own maintenance and diversification, and this aim of self-preservation is used as a control or standard by means of which the term moral is set over against the terms non-moral and immoral. Again, psychology deals to some extent with teleological connections—in its analysis of will, for example—and in its explanation of conative processes draws on the purposiveness of physiology and biology. But in neither the first nor the second method of interpreting moral experience is the method auto-teleological. The end or purpose is read into moral experience in the interests of the constructive ideal of biology or the descriptive ideal of psychology. Morality is not regarded as a self-revelational process. The auto-teleological method of interpreting moral experience aims to penetrate sympathetically to the meaning of the moral process by dwelling on the intent and the purposive implications of this peculiar type of value-setting. From this point of view immorality would be interpreted as failure, ineffectiveness, but