Page:Philosophical Review Volume 31.djvu/434

422

The ethical and the logical aspects of intelligence, while abstractly isolable, are necessarily complementary in any concrete experience. The solution of the antithesis between practicality and ideality, or between conservatism and radicalism, is to be found in neither an "empty" logic nor in a "blind" ethics, but in a synthesis of the two. A conscienceless intellect is as incomplete and as irrational as an unintelligent conscience. The field of ethics is always that of a problematical situation, involving social, not merely logical, adjustment. Ethical ideals must, however, never be abstracted from a specific logical situation but must always be determined in reference to that situation. In an organized experience, ethics and logic imply each other. To maintain the proper relation of the two is "a persistent problem of Philosophy, of Sociology and of Education, yes, and of History." An abstract use of either prevents progress, is "one of the prime causes of war," and leads to crime and other unsocial acts.

This article, an extract from a work soon to be published under the title, L'Expérience humaine et la causalité physique, confines itself to the relationship of time and causality. For Descartes time was a dimension on the same plane with the dimensions of space. For Newton it had a double aspect, just as space had: it was absolute from the point of view of God; but for human experience it remained hopelessly relative. Locke endeavored to secure the reality of time by basing it upon the succession of inner states of consciousness; but Leibnitz pointed out that such a basis was too subjective for the stability of science. In spite of Kant's abstract treatment of space and time as pure forms, it was Kant himself who suggested, in the Second Analogy of Experience, the intimate relation of time and causality. There is a necessary order of before and after in time, which is a quality more essential than its flow. This necessary order makes the temporal relation a causal one The application of the principle of causality does not depend, therefore, upon past experience and fail of application to the future, just because it is the structure of time, the order of its content, that is important. Time and causality are conceptions inextricable the one from the other; and neither conception can be abstracted from the whole mass of concrete filling.