Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/409

391 is first necessary to clearly define what we mean by life. After careful consideration we find no value in life itself excepting that which is superimposed from without—from some other principle which we value as a good. It was not always so. At the dawn of history, knowledge and culture existed for life. In Greece, for the first time this relation was reversed. The biological overemphasis of to-day is therefore a return to primitive barbarism. The various sciences may be classified in the order of their relation to life. All of them deal directly with the non-living or intellectual phase of phenomena. A certain dualism or opposition is discoverable here. Art is closer to life than is science; and yet even for art, life itself has no æsthetic value. Art tries to represent the ideal rather than to accurately copy the actual. Ethics, in its subordination of the merely living to its own values, develops in some respects an even greater opposition. We find the maximum proximity to life in religion—but its emphasis, however, is the most distant from the purely biological life. It is thus seen that the merely living can never itself be a source of value but must always be subordinated to some cultural value.

The value-judgments of modern philosophy are nothing more or less than a return in another guise of the old "judgments of essence" (formal and final) which science has so rigorously banished. In a review of two papers before the Congress at Bologna (published in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale) by Durkheim and Belot, the author aims to prove that the attempt to derive value-judgments from judgments of existence or of reality fails to account for either their theoretical or their practical value. The theological conception of morality alone accounts for value-judgments by deriving them from judgments of essence, ultimately from the conception of the Supreme Being. The social ideal of Durkheim can not be derived from mere observation of society; in its content it passes beyond the bounds of science, the world of existence, into the realm of metaphysics, of essence, of reason. Neither the individual nor society has an adequate raison d'être apart from the conception of the Absolute; the social ideal is left hanging in midair unless it is attached to the Supreme Ideal, i.e., God; the Positive conception of Ethics must find its basis and justification in the larger conception of theological ethics.

Like everything which is not yet in fixed form, the new morality is not perceived by the majority. It is less a morality which is sketched here than an ideal of action, founded on scientficscientific [sic] knowledge. Whether we can have scientific morality or not, it is possible to base morality on science. Christian