Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/302

286 so—no science (and no philosophy) would be possible. It is only through the comparison of the ordinary judgments of worth with one another, that ethics and the other normative sciences come into existence. It is never possible to compare our ordinary judgments of worth with an external and extra-ordinary standard of value. The criticism of common-sense is always immanent, never transcendent. The problem is to find the centre of the circle of judgment—moral, aesthetic, or logical—and from that centre to describe the circle; and this centre must lie within, not without, the circle whose centre it is! The ethical thinker must always, with Aristotle, come back to common-sense, and, leaving it to the metaphysician to investigate the possibility of any more ambitious explanation of its judgments, content himself with the Aristotelian, which is also the Socratic, effort to interrogate the moral common-sense of mankind, and, by interrogating it, to make it coherent and self-consistent. Common-sense, thus made coherent and self-consistent, is science.

I began by suggesting that such a limitation of ethics to the scientific standpoint and method is a return to the older or Aristotelian view of the science. Aristotle clearly differentiates ethics from metaphysics. He also differentiates it from the natural sciences, for example, from psychology. This latter differentiation is, as we should expect, less clear than the former. The conception of a normative science implies the conception of the Ought-to-be, of the ideal. But the fundamental ethical category of the Greeks is the Good, which is also the Beautiful; the Ought-consciousness is in them rudimentary, the ideal lies for them very close to the actual. For Aristotle ethics was, like logic, a practical rather than a theoretical inquiry. As logic was a manual of rules, obedience to which would insure correctness or consistency of thought, and appeal to which would decide the victory in argument, ethics was a body of rules, obedience to which would insure virtue or excellence of life. Since, however, in order to discover the path which led to the goal of human life, it was necessary to determine the goal itself, ethics became the investigation of the Good,—man's supreme