CHAPTER III

PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON WORTH, AND ON THE REASONS WHY THE METHOD EMPLOYED BY ETHICS MUST BE THE OPPOSITE OF THAT EMPLOYED BY THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES

The moral equality of men is a corollary of the attribution of worth to all men. Did we not ascribe worth to them, there is no reason why we should not make servile use of them. But there are admittedly formidable difficulties in the way of attributing worth to human nature.

The first and most obvious of these is the existence of repulsive traits in human beings, such as sly cunning, deceit, falsehood, grossness, cruelty: _homo homini lupus_! Secondly, there is the prevalent error of employing ethical terms, like good and bad, to denote the merely attractive and repellent traits.[23] Attractive traits, such as gentleness, sweetness, kindness, a sympathetic disposition, are, in those fortunate enough to possess them, pleasing accidents of nature. We delight in them, but have no reason to ascribe the superlative quality of worth to those who possess them. If the evil that men do revolts us, the so-called good in them does not give us the right to surround their heads with the nimbus of worth. Thirdly, and perhaps even more deterrent than the ever-present spectacle of evil and the inadequacy of so-called goodness, is the commonplaceness, the cheapness of men.

It must be admitted that, with rare exceptions, our estimates of others are apt to be low rather than lofty. Can we ascribe worth to those whom we hold cheap? The reason of our habitual under-estimation of fellowmen I think is that we regard them from the standpoint of the use to which we can put them, and do not see them from the inside, as it were, in the light of the marvelous energies of which human nature is the scene. The grossest matter, the most ordinary physical happenings, reveal to the instructed eye of the scientist the play of forces which it taxes the most powerful intellects in some measure to apprehend and describe. Yet these miracles escape the dull senses of those of us who deal with the forces of nature from the point of view of their immediate use. We turn on the electric light, but have little more than a crude surmise of the things that the word electricity meant to Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, or Hertz. And as we turn on the electric light, so we turn on our fellowmen, as it were, to use them. The thought of the poet—“What a piece of work is man, how infinite in faculty!” occurs to us only at scattered moments. And yet things transpire in the inner life of human beings far more marvelous than the chemical processes or the flux of electric waves, did we but attend to them. There is in particular one kind of energy to which the quality of worth may well attach itself. It is unlike the physical forces; it is not a transformed mode of mechanical energy. It is _sui generis_, underivative, unique; it is synonymous with highest freedom; it is power raised to the Nth degree. It is ethical energy. To release it in oneself is to achieve unbounded expansion. Morality, as commonly understood, is a system of rules, chiefly repressive. Ethical energy, on the contrary, is determined by the very opposite tendency; a tendency, it is true, never more than tentatively effectuated under finite conditions. And because the energy is unique, it points toward a unique, irreducible, hence substantive entity in man, from which it springs. This entity is itself incognizable, yet the effect it produces requires that it be postulated. The category of substance, which is almost disappearing from science, is to be reinstalled in ethics. Ethics cannot dispense with it. This, as a prelude, may suffice to indicate the path along which we shall proceed.

_The Reason Why the Method of Ethics Must Be the Opposite of the Method Employed by the Physical Sciences_

Physical science begins from the bottom and builds upwards. It analyzes phenomena into their elements, and thereupon seeks to combine these elements into structures that shall correspond to experience. In this business it never comes to a finish. Its analysis of the elements is provisional. Every element is hypothetical. Indeed it is plain in the nature of the case that no element can be ultimate. An element is a unit, and every empirical unit necessarily conceals in its bosom a plexus of which it is the unification. The very idea of unit requires for its complement a manifold of some kind. In hypothetical units, or ideal constructs that have for their purpose to lead to the discovery and arrangement of real phenomena, science abounds. Atoms, electrons, energy conceived as a substance by Ostwald, Spencer’s physiological units, are examples.

The results achieved by science are never more than approximations in the sense that the units, the bricks with which the house is built, are liable to be rejected, and the constructions achieved are subject to revision.

The point however which I wish to emphasize is that the scientist is satisfied of the truth, the reality of its partial results. Newton, for instance, in formulating the law of gravitation has, so to speak, marked off a strip of reality. The ground covered cannot be lost; when some natural law is enunciated, the proper conditions for its discovery and verification having been observed, a sure footing in reality has been gained, science standing to this extent on _terra firma_, though beyond the domain within which the law applies the phenomena may be heaving and billowing like the sea.

Now the question I am intent upon is, Why is it possible for science to be content with partial acquisition? Why does it profess to know positively a part without knowing the whole? And why can ethics not take a step without an ideal of the whole?

Kant’s chief purpose in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ was to vindicate the certainty of the physical knowledge of a part as being compatible with total ignorance of the whole. The older metaphysics was engaged in the attempt to supply the whole, to sketch it out in order to give certainty to the part that is within the reach of science. The older metaphysics said to science: You have in hand the conditioned, but remember the conditioned depends on the unconditioned. Unless, therefore, you round out what you possess, with the help of the unconditioned, the certainty you seem to have within the field of the conditioned disappears. Again, science traces causes, and the older metaphysicians insisted that the whole chain of causes hangs in air unless it be attached to a first cause. Now Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_ really amounts _in nuce_ to this: you do not require the whole in order to explain the part. Link the partial phenomena together in a certain way, a way dependent on the joint action of the space and time intuitions and the categories, and you will gain the desired certainty. The certainty is in the linkage. We may add link to link of the chain of reality without troubling to consider by what piers it is supported or on what shore the piers rest—if indeed there be piers and shores at all. The bridge hangs over the River of Time and we can safely travel on it. How we get on to this bridge we do not know, and where we shall leave it we cannot know either.

It is a mistake to speak of Kant as a rationalist pure and simple. When he expelled the older metaphysics he antagonized pure rationalism. The older metaphysics held that the mere existence of the conditioned proves the existence of the unconditioned, requires the unconditioned. In Kant’s answer to this lies the gist of his enterprise in philosophy: You are quite right, he says, that the _idea_ of the conditioned requires the idea of the unconditioned, logically, rationally. But observe well, nature is not just logical or rational. There is an irrational element in it, namely, extended manifold and temporal sequence. Juxtaposition and sequence are irrational, because, if I interpret him rightly, in the case of each the relation presented to the mind is that of parts outside each other—in the one case alongside, in the other before and after; while in the logical or rational relation the parts are implicit in the whole as in the case of the premises of a syllogism and the conclusion, the relation of a genus to the species, the universal to the particular.

We have in nature, according to Kant, a partnership between the irrational and the rational factors. And thereupon he proceeds to argue that we impose laws on nature, understanding thereby that we get hold of reality or objectivity in so far as we are able to imprint the rational element upon the irrational. The positing of the thing _per se_, which has proved a stumbling-block to many, is no more than a confession that we shall never succeed entirely in this business of subjecting the irrational to the rational factor. The thing _per se_ is the X that remains over when the rational function has done its utmost. A thing, a real object, is that which is imprinted with, penetrated with, rationality. The manifolds of space and time, of juxtaposition and sequence are incapable of completely receiving this imprint, that is, of completely responding to our quest for reality, and this their incompetency is expressed in the notion of the thing _per se_.

To return to the main question as to the difference between the method by which science proceeds and the reverse method prescribed to ethics, I ask, Why is absolute knowledge of nature impossible? The answer is, Because absolute knowledge would mean the completely rational construction of nature, and this is prevented by the irrational element existing in it. But why has the relative knowledge we possess the character of certainty? Why are we sure of the law of gravitation? Why are we justified in saying that science within certain limits plants her foot on _terra solida_? Because at certain points the sense data do coincide with the rational requirements. There are recurrent phenomena of such a kind, coupled together in such a way, that each is capable of mathematical measurement, and that the sequence of the one after the other can therefore be predicted.

Nature might have been arranged quite otherwise. The time spans might have been so long, as to prevent our observing the recurrences. A day-fly cannot observe the periodicity of the earth’s revolution around its axis. The fact however that there is this partial correspondence between human rationality and the unknown nature of things is a bare fact, incapable of explanation.[24] The answer, then, I take it, is: our knowledge of nature is relative, which means incompletely rational, because of the foreign element in nature unamenable to the operation of the rational, the synthetic, function. This relative knowledge is none the less certain, that is, in some sense absolute, because of the partial coincidence of the phenomena of nature and the synthetic processes of the mind.

With this degree of certainty we must perforce content ourselves, in dealing with outside nature. In trying to understand and interpret that which is not ourselves, we hit upon barriers which cannot be transcended, upon a foreign factor which opposes itself to our endeavors. But it is otherwise in the sphere of conduct. Here, if there is to be certainty at all, in regard to right as distinguished from wrong, if there is to be such a thing as right in the strict sense, we cannot content ourselves with the paradoxical, relative-absolute just described. For here we not merely interpret but act, and we must possess an ideal plan of the whole if we are to be certain of our rightness in any particular part of conduct. _For in conduct there is no such partial coincidence between the rational and the irrational as in the case of physical law._ There is not a single partial rule of conduct, neither “Thou shalt not kill” nor “Thou shalt not lie,” nor any other that, taken by itself, is of itself ethically right. It may be right, it may be wrong. It takes its ethical quality from the plan of conduct as a whole, and without reference to the whole it is devoid of rightness.[25]

I have thus indicated the ground of the distinction between the method of science and the method of ethics, a distinction, it is true, to which Kant himself did not adhere. Partial coincidence of the rational with the irrational is expressed in physical law; absence of such concurrence destroys any attempt to build up an ethical theory on the empirical method. We cannot plant our feet on the part, gaining there the sense of certainty: we must creatively conceive the ideal of the whole and educe every partial mode of ethical conduct from that.

But how shall we proceed in the construction of such an ideal, for it is obvious that knowledge, in the scientific sense of the word, is entirely out of the question?

FOOTNOTES:

[23] See the more extended remarks on this subject in Book III.

[24] In Kant’s view the rational element is projected on the irrational. In this way spatial juxtaposition is ideally transformed into a spatial continuum. In the same manner temporal sequence is ideally changed into a uniform temporal flux. Without the former, geometry could not have established its propositions; without the latter Galileo could not have measured the fall of the stone.

[25] The ethical character of acts depends on the worth of the agent and the object. Is it right to kill or to enslave a fellowman? We do not hesitate to kill an animal, or to harness horses to vehicles, or to use them as beasts of burden. Why not kill men, or use them as beasts of burden in like manner?—Only because they possess a worth which gives them a different standing.

Is it on grounds of sympathy that I should observe the so-called moral rules? But if I am not sympathetic by nature, why should I be subject to censure in case I refrain from displaying a tenderness which I do not feel? Why should I sympathize with the pleasures and pains of fellow human beings any more than with the pleasures and pains of inferior sentient creatures, unless men have worth? And worth, as will appear in the subsequent chapters, signifies indispensableness in a perfect whole. No detached thing has worth. No part of an incomplete system has worth. Worth belongs to those to whom it is attributed in so far as they are conceived of as not to be spared, as representing a distinctive indispensable preciousness, a mode of being without which perfection would be less than perfect.

So that morality depends on the attribution of worth to men, and worth depends on the formation in the mind of an ideal plan of the whole—or instead of a complete plan let me say more precisely a rule of relations whereby the plan is itself progressively developed.