A second implication of our basic assertion is that since our knowledge of man has, after a hundred false starts, just recently become in any way accurate, so must our views on ethical questions be regarded as still in the infancy of their truth. Moreover, just as scientific inquiry in every other field is subject to revision upon each new discovery of signal importance, so must ethical science, during the period of its infancy, be subject countless times to an equally sweeping revision. In other words, the scientific attitude toward ethics forestalls any attempt or wish to draw on some phantom bank account to eke out the ethical resources of mankind, insufficient though such resources may at times appear to be. He who, like the mechanist, believes that virtue is a strictly natural phenomenon, must not carry a-priori standards into his work, but must believe that an accurate description of human nature will furnish all the necessary data for an applied science of human conduct. To be sure, since man is a creature who likes and dislikes, who prefers and rejects, this very fact precludes an ethics without any mention of ideals of one sort or another. Nevertheless, it is our particular business here not to establish or insist on any set of ideals in advance of an empirical study of human conduct, for it may well be that what we call our highest ideals are, in the light of science, in need of considerable revision.
With this by way of introduction, we shall at once proceed with the work already proposed. And just as a new proprietor of an old business begins by taking inventory, so shall we at once take stock of the ethical resources of man. Our method for the time being will be the method of the statistician. Following the arrangement of our data as we find them, we shall first seek to answer that most interesting and, indeed, fundamental question, namely, Why do our ethical judgments always occur in pairs of antonyms? This enquiry will bring us to the very center of the ethical problem. Next we shall ask just what our ten principal ethical concepts really mean, and shall seek to discover their relationships to one another. Finally, we shall endeavor to show how the knowledge thus derived, when combined with insight into the mechanics of body and mind, furnishes us with an ethical technique which transcends both in scope and effectiveness all that we have hitherto possessed.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] R. B. Perry, “Present Philosophical Tendencies,” p. 127.
CHAPTER II
A PHYSIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION OF THE ANTAGONISM BETWEEN ALL SUCH WORDS AS “GOOD” AND “BAD,” AND “RIGHT” AND “WRONG”
“A word is the shadow of an act.”
Democritus.
It is a fact of the greatest significance that the words by which we convey our ideas of value always occur in pairs, one of which is the opposite of the other. In esthetics the beautiful is contrasted with the ugly, and the charming with the disgusting; in logic the true clashes with the false, and in philosophy the real with the unreal; in matters of public and private economy the cheap is antithetical to the expensive, and the generous to the miserly; while in ethics we constantly hear the words good and bad, right and wrong, virtuous and vicious employed to denote the opposition and contradiction of human interests and ideals. What is the ultimate reason why we thus employ such pairs of antonyms in our judgments of praise or blame, our expressions of desire or aversion, and in our estimations of merit or defect?
This modern question, upon which the founding of a true science of ethics depends, cannot be answered by any appeal to the speculative metaphysics of bygone generations. We have passed out of that period in which men were content with an explanation based on the Zoroastrian hypothesis of a world divided between the warring forces of light and darkness, while our ears are now equally unresponsive to the bi-polar principles of love and hate which Empedocles propounded. Even our recent Emerson’s “Law of Compensation,” born though it was of canny, scientific thinking, is not marked by the least sign of that finality which the answer we seek should possess. It is, indeed, our conviction that the presence of antonyms in human speech is not to be accounted for by the assumption of a theory concerning the world as a whole, but rather by an examination of some of the baldest facts of our everyday experience. Nay more, it is our declared purpose to show that the metaphysical and theological notions of Empedocles and Zoroaster are themselves to be explained by reference to the physics and the physiology of man,—in terms of the structure and functions of the human body. But before we can comprehend the significance of such a thesis, it is first necessary to understand some of the physiological mechanisms underlying thought and speech.