Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/330

314 The former should give the general theories of moral action, while the latter should apply these theories to the concrete relations of men. Particular ethics should again be divided into natural theology, economics, and politics. The latter should include the philosophy of the state, jurisprudence, international law, and finance. This last science connects politics with economics, these sciences referring respectively to the state and the family as institutions. While important writers assert that they merely seek to know the facts, and what is, regardless of what ought to be, their works demonstrate that the ultimate purpose of the facts is to determine ideals. In the business world, acts of justice and unselfishness are of common occurrence. If, then, for commerce, conscience exists, should it not be received by the economist, even though it looks to what ought to be, and not to what is?

This article is a critism of Wundt's Ethik. Wundt professes to show the derivation of morality from non-moral elements, and to proceed by a strictly objective method, but it can hardly be said that he succeeds. Religion gives us the immoral as well as the moral. The same thing is true of custom. Wundt admits both these facts, and yet claims that the chief source of morality is in customs which have been established by religion. As a matter of fact, he assumes original moral elements—altruistic impulses, and the feeling of sympathy—which he has really found, not by an objective, but by a subjective method, viz., introspection. He holds that ethics is a normative science, but fails to show the relation between empiricism and the ethical norm. An empirical ethics cannot give us eternal norms, yet this is what Wundt claims to have done. In trying to explain the relation between the individual will and the collective will, Wundt makes great use of the sympathetic feelings. In this concept of the universal will, he approximates to Stoicism.

The purpose of this article is to justify, in a measure, the claim of the new science of society to an origin and existence independent of ethical and social philosophy, and at the same time to suggest a deeper connection on the basis of a definite relation between the two types of theory. The essence of the 'new science' is that 'social phenomena are subject to natural laws, admitting of rational prevision.' Philosophy, studying man in