METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF MORALITY.

Introductory. 1. Ethics and metaphysics.-We have seen1 that while the science of ethics must be carefully distinguished from metaphysics or philosophy, yet the science of ethics must have for its complement an ethical philosophy or a metaphysic of ethics. Metaphysics must endeavour, here as elsewhere, to travel beyond the scientific explanation to one that is deeper and ultimate. But here as elsewhere we are met by the agnostic objection to all metaphysics. We are asked to substitute physics for metaphysics, positivism for transcendentalism, science for philosophy. A science of ethics, it is urged, is all that is needful and possible. Mr Leslie Stephen, the apologist' of Agnosticism, tells us, in his Science of Ethics, that, in his opinion, "it is useless to look for any further light from metaphysical inquiries." His demand is for ethical realism, which means for him ethical empiricism, positivism, or phenomenalism. Let us keep to the moral facts or phenomena, to "moral reality," and not seek to penetrate to its transcendental background, or think to find the sanctions of human conduct in the divine or the ideal. If we understand the inter-relations of the facts of the moral life, we shall sufficiently understand their moral significance. Let us ascertain "the meaning to be attached to morality so long as we remain 1 Introduction, ch. ii. Ꮓ

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in the world of experience; and if, in the transcendental world, you can find a deeper foundation for morality, that does not concern me. I am content to build upon the solid earth. You may, if you please, go down to the elephant or the tortoise." It is not necessary "to begin at the very beginning, and to solve the whole problem of the universe" before you "get down to morality." "My view, therefore, is that the science of ethics deals with realties; that metaphysical speculation does not help us to ascertain the relevant facts. . . . This is virtually to challenge the metaphysician to show that he is of any use in the matter." 2

This challenge the metaphysician need have no hesitation in accepting, and his answer to it will consist in a careful definition of the ethical problem and of the possible solutions of it. That problem is not, What are the facts or phenomena of morality? but, How are we to interpret these facts? What is their ultimate significance? The former question will no doubt help us to answer the latter; knowledge of the puois, or the actual nature, will lead us to the knowledge of the ovoía, or the essential nature and meaning, of moral as of other facts. We must admit that the empirical and inductive method has its rights in the ethical as in all other fields of inquiry, and that the 'high priori road' is a road that leads to no result in ethical any more than in natural philosophy. We need always the instruction of experience; knowledge lies for us in an unprejudiced study of the facts. But the Baconian method of pure induction, or mere observation, will not serve us any better than the method of pure metaphysical deduction. The low posteriori road will also bring us to no goal of knowledge. It is never mere facts that we seek, it is always the meaning of the facts; and the accumulation of facts is never more than a means towards the attainment of that insight into their significance which makes the facts luminous. Every fact, every element of 1 Op. cit., p. 446. 2 Ibid., p. 450.

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reality, carries us beyond itself for its explanation; if we would understand it we must relate it to other facts, and these to others, until, to understand the meanest, slightest fact or element of reality, we find that we should have to relate it to all the other facts of the universe, and to see it as an element of universal Reality. In the perfect knowledge of the "little flower root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is." Even so the lowliest flower that grows on the soil of human life is rooted in the deeper soil of universal Reality, and is fed by the sap of the cosmos itself. The controversy between agnosticism and metaphysics is, therefore, not a controversy between realism and idealism, between science and unscientific philosophy. It is rather a controversy between a narrower and a wider view of Reality, between a more superficial and a more profound interpretation of the facts. The distinction between science and philosophy is not a distinction of kind, but only of degree. Science, not less than philosophy, is 'the thinking view of things': what the man of science seeks to apprehend is the meaning of the facts. And the philosopher is ambitious to gather from the hints of science the total meaning of the facts. Where science seeks to think the facts, philosophy seeks to think them out. Science abstracts certain elements of reality from the rest, in the hope of mastering these elements; but always, as the investigation proceeds, it is found that the mastery of the elements selected for examination implies the mastery of others, and the mastery of these the mastery of others, until-even from the scientific point of view-it is seen that a perfect mastery of any would imply the perfect mastery of all. And on our journey towards this 'master-light of all our seeing,' it is hardly possible to say where science ends and philosophy begins. Metaphysics, we are told, is a leap in the dark.' But even the man of science makes his leap in the dark, his leap from the light of the known to the darkness of the unknown. It is only by such venture

someness that the light of knowledge is let into the darkness of the unknown, but not unknowable. Why should a limit be put to this speculative courage, which is at the root of all intellectual progress? Why should not the metaphysician be allowed to make his bolder leap into the deeper darkness? The darkness is thick indeed, but not therefore impenetrable. At any rate, “it is vain," as Kant says, "to profess indifference to those questions to which the mind of man can never really be indifferent."

In the case now in question, the metaphysician only seeks to attain a more intimate and exhaustive knowledge of moral reality than the scientific moralist, to penetrate to the deeper reality of moral phenomena, to understand what it is that thus appears,' to grasp the 'being' of moral 'seeming.' The scientific moralist studies morality in abstraction from its bearing on the whole theory of the cosmos. His ambition is to discover the true system of the moral judgments; and he does not raise the question of the ultimate validity of these judgments or of their relation to other judgments, intellectual or æsthetic. But a final and adequate view of morality itself is not reached, a satisfactory explanation of morality is not attained, so long as we separate morality either from nature or from God. Reality is one, and its elements must be seen in their mutual relation if they are to be understood as in reality they are. The question of the objective and ultimate validity of our moral judgments, and of the relation of these judgments to our other judgments of value and to our judgments of fact, is a question that insists on being heard. Ethics is therefore finally inseparable from metaphysics, and it needs no "ingenious sophistry" to force them into relation." If we would reach an adequate interpretation of human life, we must place man in his true human 'setting,' we must discover his relation to the world and to God. The meaning of human life is part of the meaning of the universe itself, the moral

order is part of the universal order, the ethical process is part of the cosmic process. The establishment of the superior claims of the positive or scientific explanation is itself a metaphysical undertaking, and demands, for its successful accomplishment, a comparison with the transcendental or metaphysical view. We must, in any case, test the metaphysical possibilities of the case, before we have any right to pronounce against metaphysics, here or elsewhere.

To investigate the metaphysical basis of morality is simply to go from the outside to the inside, from the circumference to the centre, from a partial to a complete view of the ethical problem. If all questions are, in the last analysis and in the ultimate issue, metaphysical questions, the ethical question can least of all escape this fate. Ethics is not mere anthropology. To interpret the life of man as man, we must interpret human nature, and its world or sphere; we must investigate man's place in nature, his relations to his fellows, and his relation to that life of God which in some sense must include the life of nature and of man. Man, with his moral life, is part of the universe; and it has been truly said that it is really the universe that, in him, is interrogating itself as to the ultimate meaning of moral experience. For, in the moral world no less than in the intellectual, experience is not the last word. The transcendental or 'metempirical' question will not be silenced: What, in nature, man and God, in the universal Reality, is the basis, presupposition, or sanction of this experience? We must distinguish the scientific or 'relative' ethics from such a philosophic or 'absolute' ethics. But the scientific must in the end fall within the philosophic, the relative within the absolute; and, short of a metaphysic of ethics, there is no final resting-place for the human mind. That metaphysic may be either naturalistic or idealistic. On the one hand, the law of human life may be reduced to terms of natural law, the moral ideal may be resolved into the