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284 investigate the ultimate validity of the judgments of value, as well as of the judgments of fact; and, in order to determine this, it must study these judgments in their relations both to one another and to the judgments of fact. The final term of metaphysical judgment may be normative, rather than naturalistic. The question of the worth of existence is probably more important than the question of the nature of existence: meaning is probably rather a matter of value than a matter of fact. And the ultimate term of metaphysical value may be ethical, rather than logical or aesthetic. Moral worth is probably the supreme worth, and the true metaphysic is probably a metaphysic of ethics. But the metaphysical ultimateness of that term—whatsoever it be—will not have been demonstrated until all the other terms have been reduced to it, explained, and not explained away, by means of it.

Two misunderstandings of the term 'normative science' must be guarded against. First, the distinction between normative and natural, or appreciative and descriptive, sciences is not intended to imply that the method of the one group of sciences is in any respect different from the method of the other. The method of science is always the same, namely, the systematization of our ordinary judgments through their reduction to a common unifying principle, or through their purification from inconsistency with one another. Whether these judgments are judgments of fact or judgments of worth, makes no difference in the method. There is nothing mysterious, or superior, or metaphysical in the procedure of the normative sciences; it is the plain, unmetaphysical, strictly scientific method, only applied in a different field—to a different subject-matter. It is merely this difference in the subject-matter that I have desired to assert and to emphasize. The business of ethics, for example, is, like the business of physics, simply to organize the judgments of common-sense or ordinary thought. There is a 'common-sense' of value, as there is a 'common-sense' of fact; and there is a science of value, as there is a science of fact. The function of the former science, as of the latter, is simply to make common-sense coherent and