Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/299

No. 3.] frankly anthropocentric as the natural sciences are cosmocentric. Whether or not, in our ultimate interpretation of reality, we must shift our centre, is a question which metaphysics must answer.

The fact that it is the genius and function of the normative sciences to transcend the actual, and to judge its value in terms of the ideal, doubtless brings these sciences nearer than the natural sciences to metaphysics or ultimate philosophy. For while the natural sciences are content with the discovery of the phenomenal order, the order of the facts themselves, even a naturalistic or utilitarian ethics, for example, is an evaluation of human life in terms of a standard or ideal, viz., pleasure. A judgment of worth is speculative—we might almost say metaphysical—in a sense in which a judgment of fact is not speculative or metaphysical. Its point of view is transcendental, not empirical. It follows that the science which organizes such judgments into a system is also transcendental, and, in that sense, metaphysical. Yet such a science is not strictly to be identified with metaphysics, for three reasons. First, it agrees with common-sense in assuming the validity of the judgments of value, whose system it is seeking to construct. Secondly, it abstracts one set of judgments of value—the logical, or the aesthetic, or the ethical—from the rest of the judgments of value. Thirdly, it abstracts the judgments of value from the judgments of fact. Now it is the business of metaphysics to