and the various forms of this pleasure have been well described by the psychological' and evolutionary moralists. But, after all this descriptive explanation of the motivation of choice, the problem of the content of the moral ideal itself remains unsolved and even untouched.1

It is not to be denied that the standard of ethical appreciation has itself evolved. With the gradual evolution of morality there is being gradually evolved a reflective formulation of its content and significance. The evolving moral being is always judging the moral evolution, and there is an evolution of moral judgment as well as of the conduct which is judged. We must distinguish, however, between the subjective or psychological fact of moral judgment, on the one hand, and the objective content of such judgment, on the other. Just as logic distinguishes between the psychological fact and the logical content of intellectual judgment, so must ethics, as a normative science, distinguish between the psychological fact and the objective content of moral judgment. The history of the causation of the psychological fact is one question; the content of its testimony is another question. Ethics has to do with man's ends (in respect of their content), and not with the process or mechanism of their accomplishment. And for ethics as a normative science, the objective validity of moral judgment (whether crude and early, or ripe and late) is a necessary assumption, just as, for logic, the objective validity of intellectual judgment is a necessary assumption. The reality of the good, and our ability by

2

1 Such an exposure of the fallacy of ethical 'Naturalism,' 'Evolutionism,' or 'Empiricism,' is, of course, at the same time an exposure of ethical 'Supernaturalism,' 'Intuitionism,' or 'A priorism.' The question of ethics is a question not of origin, but of content; not of causation, but of meaning. The truth in Intuitionism is, in my opinion, simply its assertion of the ultimateness for ethics of the ethical point of view.

2 Strangely enough, Professor S. Alexander states the distinction between the methods of ethics and psychology in just these terms, and yet adopts the latter method in his own investigation. Cf. Moral Order and Progress, pp. 62-70.

reflection to discover it (more or less fully), are the postulates of ethics, as the reality of truth, and our ability by reflection to discover it, are the postulates of logic. It is for metaphysics to deal with both assumptions.

Yet we must never forget the dependence of ethics as a normative science upon the natural science of ethics. As we have just seen, the reflective formulation of morality is, like morality itself, progressive. It follows that the complete ethical formula at any stage must include all preceding formulæ, and that the final ethical formula would be the last word of evolution itself. The true ethical interpretation of human life must be plastic as Aristotle's 'Lesbian rule,'-the living expression of the changing life of man; and the moral life does not, any more than the physical life, commit itself to any expression as final and exhaustive.

2. Ethical method scientific, not metaphysical. The normative sciences, however, are to be distinguished, no less than the natural sciences, from metaphysics or philosophy, whose problem is the determination of the ultimate or absolute validity of all our judgments, whether they are judgments of fact or judgments of worth. Neither the natural nor the normative sciences deal with the question of their own ultimate validity. It is the function of metaphysics to act as critic of the sciences; the sciences do not criticise themselves. Each assumes the validity of its own standpoint, and of its own system of judgments. The normative sciences deal with our judgments of worth, just as the natural sciences deal with our judgments of fact; neither the one group of sciences nor the other investigates the final validity of the judgments which, in their original chaotic condition, are the datum, and, in their systematic order, the result of the sciences in question. Whether natural or normative, science is

content with the discovery of the unifying principle which organises the several judgments of ordinary unscientific thought into a scientific system. The determination of the grounds of our right to judge at all, whether about facts or values, and of the relative validity of our judgments of fact and our judgments of value, science leaves to metaphysics, which, in considering the epistemological question of the possibility of an ultimate vindication of human knowledge in general, is compelled to face the ontological question of the ultimate nature of reality itself. As the natural sciences leave to metaphysics the problem of the ultimate validity of our judgments of fact, and, with that question, the determination of the ultimate nature of reality, the normative sciences leave to metaphysics the inquiry into the ultimate validity of our judgments of value, or the real significance of our ideals. As the natural sciences are content with the discovery of the actual order, or the order of reality as it exists for us, the normative sciences are content with the discovery of the ideal order as it demands the obedience of our thought and feeling and activity. Both the normative and the natural sciences alike have to be criticised and correlated by metaphysics, whose question of questions is that of the comparative validity of the Is-judgments and the Ought-judgments as expressions of ultimate reality, the respective merits of Realism and Idealism, of Naturalism and Transcendentalism, as interpretations of the universe.

To take the case of ethics in particular, we must carefully distinguish the science from the metaphysic of ethics. The science of ethics has nothing to do with the question of the freedom of the will, for example. As the science of morality, ethics has a right to assume that man is a moral being, since his judgments about conduct imply the idea of morality. But whether this scientific assumption is finally valid or invalid, whether the moral judgments are trustworthy

or illusory, and whether or not their validity implies the freedom of man as a moral being, are problems for metaphysics to solve. Again, ethics does not base its view of human life, its system of moral judgments, upon any metaphysical interpretation of reality, whether idealistic or naturalistic; although here, as elsewhere, the scientific result must form an all-important datum for metaphysics. Similarly the problem of God, or the ultimate reality of the moral order, and the nature of this ethical reality-the relation of man's moral ideal to the universe of which he is a part-is a question not for ethics, but for metaphysics. Ethics, as a science, abstracts human life from the rest of the universe; it is as 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.

1

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,

1 Cf. Mr Balfour (loc. cit., pp. 337, 338): "The general propositions which really lie at the root of any ethical system must themselves be ethical, and can never be either scientific or metaphysical. In other words, if a proposition announcing obligation require proof at all, one term of that proof must always be a proposition announcing obligation, which itself requires no proof. There is no artifice by which an ethical statement can be evolved from a scientific or metaphysical proposition, or from any combination of such; and whenever the reverse appears to be the fact, it will always be found that the assertion which seems to be the basis of the ethical superstructure is in reality merely the 'minor' of a syllogism, of which the 'major' is the desired ethical principle." It should be noted that Mr Balfour uses the term 'science' to designate natural science exclusively. What I have called a 'normative science,' he would apparently include in philosophy. T. H. Green, and recently Mr C. F. D'Arcy (A Short Study of Ethics), have insisted upon a metaphysical derivation of ethics. Cf. Professor Dewey's discussion of "The Metaphysical Study of Ethics" (Psychological Review, vol. iii. pp 181-188).

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 organises 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 commonsense 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 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 æsthetic. Moral worth is probably the supreme worth, and the true metaphysic is probably a metaphysic of ethics. But the metaphysical

ultimateness of that term-whatever 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.1

1 For a further and more positive statement of the relation of metaphysics to ethics, see infra, Part III.