Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/192

Rh only in case he believes that the Spencerian ideal of the Good is unattainable. Thus axioms are manufactured whenever we need them.

All this is mere neglect of whatever ideals do not at once fit into one’s own ideal. Such neglect is unworthy of an ethical inquirer. Yet it has been frequently committed in recent times, and it is committed whenever a man endeavors or pretends, as Professor Clifford also very skillfully endeavored and pretended, to found ethical science wholly upon the basis and by the methods of natural science. Such attempts are like the efforts of a man trying to build a steamboat, who should first drop the steam-engine into the water, and then seek to build the boat up about the engine so as to float it and be driven by it. For natural science will indeed give us the engine of our applied ethics, as indispensable as the steam-engine to the boat. But first we must lay the keel, and we must get the boat ready for the engine, the ideal ready for the science that is to apply it. All such attempts as those that put the “scientific basis” first, lamely strive to conceal their helplessness behind a show of appealing to the “facts of human nature and of the social structure, as science discovers them.” But these facts reveal a confused warfare of aims among men, no one aim being actually chosen by the whole of men. And then the “scientific moralist” tries to show by all sorts of devices that all men really have the same aim. But he cannot show that, because it is not true. What aim is common to the whole life of any one of us? Much less then is any aim common to all men.