[250] Students of that important nineteenth-century book upon Ethics, the Methods of Ethics, by Henry Sidgwick, will remember that Sidgwick expressly states it as a grave argument against Utilitarianism that it is by no means confirmed by the study of the actual origin of moral distinctions. As we go back in history we do not find that moral prescriptions have merely a utilitarian value.
[251] What I understand by the “normative idea of ethical science” will become more apparent as I proceed. I may as well state, however, that I look upon the distinction between the “descriptive” ideals of science and the “normative” character of the ideals of the ethical and the socio-political sciences as both fundamental and far-reaching. There are two things, as it were, that constitute what we might call the subject-matter of philosophy—-“facts” and “ideals”; or, rather, it is the synthesis and reconciliation of these two orders of reality that constitute the supreme problem of philosophy. It is with the description of facts and of the laws of the sequences of things that the “methodology” of science and of Pragmatism is in the main concerned. And it is because Pragmatism has hitherto shown itself unable to rise above the descriptive and hypothetical science of the day to the ideals of the normative sciences (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) that it is an imperfect philosophy of reality as we know it, or of the different orders of reality.
[252] Cf. Professor Ward in Naturalism and Agnosticism (vol. ii. p. 155): “What each one immediately deals with in his own experience is, I repeat, objective reality in the most fundamental sense.”
[253] Introduction to Science, p. 137.
[254] “But if the primitive Amoebae gave rise ‘in the natural course of events’ to higher organisms and these to higher, until there emerged the supreme Mammal, who by and by had a theory of it all, then the primitive Amoebae which had in them the promise and the potency of all this were very wonderful Amoebae indeed. There must have been more in them than met the eye! We must stock them, with initiatives at least. We are taking a good deal as ‘given.’” [Italics mine.]—J. H. Thomson, Introduction to Science, p. 137.
[255] See Westermarck, vol. i. pp. 74, 93, 117, and chapter iii. generally. The sentence further down in respect of the permanent fact of the moral consciousness is from Hobhouse, vol. ii. p. 54. As instances of the latter, Hobhouse talks of things like the “purity of the home, truthfulness, hospitality, help”, etc., in Iran, of the doctrine of Non-Resistance in Lao Tsze, of the high conception of personal righteousness revealed in the Book of the Dead, of the contributions of monotheism to ethics, etc. etc.
[256] Cf. p. 167.
[257] It may, I suppose, be possible to exaggerate here and to fall to some extent into what Mr. Bradley and Nietzsche and others have thought of as the “radical vice of all goodness”—its tendency to forget that other things, like beauty and truth, may also be thought of as absolute “values,” as revelations of the divine. What I am thinking of here is simply the realm of fact that is implied, say, in the idea of Horace, when he speaks of the upright man being undismayed even by the fall of the heavens (impavidum ferient ruinae) or by the idea of the Stoic sage that the virtuous man was as necessary to Jupiter as Jupiter could be to him, or by the idea (attributed to Socrates) that if the rulers of the universe do not prefer the just man to the unjust it is better to die than to live. If against all this sort of thing one is reminded by realism of the “splendid immoralism” of Nature, of its apparent indifference to all good and ill desert, I can but reply, as I have done elsewhere in this book, that the Nature of which physical science speaks is an “abstraction” and an unreality, and that it matters, therefore, very little whether such a Nature is, or is not, indifferent to morality. We know, however, of no Nature apart from life, and mind, and consciousness, and thought, and will. It is God, and not Nature, who makes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust.
[258] By this “meaning” is to be understood firstly the effects upon our appetitive and conative tendencies of the various specific items (whether sensation, or affections, or emotions, or what not) of our experience, the significance, that is to say, to our total general activity of all the particular happenings and incidents of our experience. Psychologists all tell us of the vast system of “dispositions” with which our psychophysical organism is equipped at birth, and through the help of which we interpret the sensations and occurrences of our experience. And in addition to these dispositions we have, in the case of the adult, the coming into play of the many associations and memories that are acquired during the experiences of a single lifetime. It is these various associations that interpret to us the present and give it meaning. In a higher sense we might interpret “meaning” as expressive of the higher predicates, like the good and the beautiful and the true, that we apply to some things in the world of our socialized experience. And in the highest sense we might interpret it as the significance that we attach to human history as distinguished from the mere course of events—the significance upon which the philosophy of history reposes. See Eucken in the article upon the Philosophy of History in the “systematic” volume of Hinneberg’s Kultur der Gegenwart.
[259] See our second chapter upon the different continental and British representatives of the hypothetical treatment of scientific laws and conceptions that is such a well-marked tendency of the present time. By no one perhaps was this theory put more emphatically than by Windelband (of Strassburg) in his Präludien (1884) and in his Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft (1894). In the latter he contrasts the real individuals and personalities with which the historians deal with the impersonal abstractions of natural science. I fully subscribe to this distinction, and think that it underlies a great deal of the thought of recent times.