Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/298

282 question of the ultimate nature of reality itself. As the natural sciences leave to metaphysics the question of the ultimate validity of our judgments of fact, and, with that question, the question of the ultimate nature of reality, the normative sciences leave to metaphysics the question of the ultimate validity of our judgments of value, or the real significance of our ideals. As the natural sciences are content with the discovery of the actual order, or the order of reality as it exists for us, the normative sciences are content with the discovery of the ideal order as it demands the obedience of our thought and feeling and activity. Both the normative and the natural sciences alike have to be criticised and correlated by meta-physics, whose question of questions is that of the comparative validity of the Is-judgments and the Ought-judgments as expressions of ultimate reality, the respective merits of Realism and Idealism, of Naturalism and Transcendentalism, as intepretations of the universe.

To take the case of ethics in particular, we must carefully distinguish the science from the metaphysic of ethics. The science of ethics has nothing to do with the question of the freedom of the will, for example. As a science, the science of morality, ethics has a right to assume that man is a moral being, since his judgments about conduct imply the idea of moral being. But whether this scientific assumption is finally valid or invalid, whether the moral judgments are trustworthy or illusory, and whether or not their validity implies the freedom of man as a moral being,—are questions for metaphysics to answer. Again, ethics does not base its view of human life, its system of moral judgment, upon any metaphysical interpretation of reality, whether idealistic or naturalistic, although here, as elsewhere, the scientific result must form an all- important datum for metaphysics. Similarly the question of God, or the ultimate reality of the moral order, and the nature of this ethical reality—the question of the relation of man's moral ideal to the universe of which he is a part—is a question not for ethics, but for metaphysics. Ethics, as a science, abstracts human life from the rest of the universe; it is as