Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/291

275 S the true method of ethics the method of science or that of philosophy? Our answer to this question must determine our general view of the ethical problem, and cannot fail to affect the solution which we reach. The characteristic tendency of our time to reduce all thought to the scientific form, and to draw the line sharply between natural or positive science, on the one hand, and metaphysics or philosophical speculation, on the other, has made itself felt in ethics, which is now defined as 'moral science' rather than as 'moral philosophy,' its older designation. Nor is this usage of terms a complete novelty in ethical literature. Aristotle, the father of the science, clearly distinguished ethics as the science of the Good (for man) from metaphysics or 'first philosophy,' whose task was the investigation of the ultimate nature of things, the absolute Good, or the Good of the universe itself. In the older English ethics we find the same limitation of the inquiry, and a frequent adoption of the psychological method. It is to Kant and his successors, in Germany and in England, that the encroachment of metaphysics upon ethics is chiefly due. Kant does not separate the science of ethics from the metaphysic of ethics, which is, for him, the only legitimate metaphysic. The influence of Kant in this respect is evident in the intuitional ethics of the later Scottish school, hardly less than in the idealistic ethics of the Neo-Hegelians. It is this general acceptance of the metaphysical method in ethical inquiry that has led to the protest on the part of the scientific mind of our time, and to the proclamation by the Evolutionary school that ethics must accept the common method of exact knowledge, and, like psychology (which was also wont, within recent memory, to claim near kinship with metaphysics, if not even to play the rôle of the latter), become a 'natural science.'

Yet, while we must recognize in the view that the true method of ethics is scientific rather than philosophic, a return to the older and sounder tradition of ethical thought, it is