have produced the acts, motives, and characters with which we are concerned; all these have interest for us only because, and in so far as, we stamp them with a certain value, only because they bear a certain relation to the human soul, only because they provoke peculiar ethical feelings and judgments in us. Acts which are capable of exciting such judgments fall within the province of the science of ethics. There could be no science of ethics if no one ever approved and disapproved of things, if no one ever called things right and wrong. If the contemplation of certain acts and motives did not arouse in us ethical feelings and judgments, there could be no science of ethics because there would be no facts for ethics to study. We might perhaps be perfect physicists, physiologists, astronomers, and even philosophers, but we should never pronounce moral judgment upon an act. That we place a value upon things, that we call them right or good, wrong or bad, is the important fact in ethics, is what makes a science of ethics possible.1 5. The Subject-matter of Ethical Judgment. We said before that moral judgment was pronounced upon acts, but, we must add, not upon all acts. We do not feel like judging unless the act is the product of some conscious being like ourself. We do not call an earthquake or a cyclone right or wrong; as Martineau says, "we neither applaud the gold-mine 1 See Höffding, Ethik, III, and his Ethische Principienlehre; Münsterberg, Der Ursprung der Sittlichkeit, pp. 10 ff. nor blame the destructive storm."1 The child and the savage may applaud and condemn such occurrences and inanimate objects, but this is most likely because they regard them as endowed with soul, or because they have heard others do so. Generally speaking, we nowadays limit our judgments to the actions of conscious human beings. We expect the act to have a mental or psychical background. When the act is the expression of a conscious human being, we feel like judging it morally. But when we are told that the agent did not control it, that it occurred without his willing it, or that he was not capable of reasoning and feeling and willing in a healthy manner at the time of its performance, then we withhold our judgment. We do not praise or blame the movements made in an epileptic fit, or hypnotic trance, or in sleep, or reflex actions over which the person has no power. Nor do we condemn or approve of the acts of a lunatic. But in case any of the acts under consideration are the necessary consequents of some previous conduct of the doer, which, we believe, he might have avoided,. we pronounce judgment upon them, or at any rate upon him. Wherever we are convinced that the acts were purely mechanical, that is, physically determined, and not accompanied by consciousness, we do not judge them morally. But whenever consciousness is present in the performance of the act, we are tempted to judge. 1 Types of Ethical Theory, Vol. II, p. 20. Let us therefore say that the subject-matter of ethical judgment is human conduct, that is, consciously purposive action.1 We must not forget, however, that this was not always the case, and is not even now, perhaps, universally true. But it makes no difference to us here upon what the mind pronounces its judgments. The important thing for ethics is that such judgments are pronounced at all, and it is the business of the science to examine every fact or act which is judged ethically, or is capable of being so judged. 6. Definition of Ethics. Ethics may now be roughly defined as the science of right and wrong, the science of duty, the science of moral principles, the science of moral judgment and conduct. It analyzes, classifies, describes, and explains moral phenomena, on their subjective as well as on their objective side. It tells us what these phenomena are, separates them into their constituent elements, and refers them to their antecedents or conditions; it discovers the principles upon which they are based, the laws which govern them; it explains their origin and traces their development. In short, it reflects upon them, thinks them over, attempts to answer all possible questions which may be asked with reference to them. It does with its facts what every science does with its subject-matter it strives to know everything that 1 See Seth, A Study of Ethical Principles, chap. i; Spencer, Data of Ethics, chap i; Muirhead, A Manual of Ethics, pp. 15–17; Martineau, op. cit., Vol. II, chap. i. can be known about them, to correlate them, to unify them, to insert them into a system. 7. The Interrelation of Sciences. When we say, however, as we did before, that there are separate sciences, we do not wish to be understood as meaning that these sciences are absolutely distinct from each other, that their respective facts are to be studied apart from all other phenomena in the world. This is not the case. The world presents itself to us as one, as a unity, a concrete whole. The mind splits it up into parts, but these parts are by no means really separate, independent entities. No phenomenon can be thoroughly understood in isolation, apart from all other phenomena. Strictly speaking, we cannot know one fact without knowing them all. "To know one thing thoroughly," as Professor James says, "would be to know the whole universe. Mediately or immediately, that one thing is related to everything else; and to know all about it, all its relations need be known."1 Tennyson expresses the same idea poetically in the oft-quoted lines : "Little flower-but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, 1 See Leibniz, Monadology, § 61: " Everybody is affected by everything that happens in the world, so that a man seeing everything would know from each particular object everything that takes place everywhere, as well as what has taken place and will take place; he perceives in the present that which is remote in time and space." Cf. Paulsen, Introduction to Philosophy, translated by Frank Thilly, pp. 145 ff. Sciences And as the world is one, science is one. depend upon each other, are subservient to each other. Thus the facts of psychology are in some way related to the facts of physiology and physics; we cannot study the phenomenon of sensation without referring to the functions of the nervous system and the properties of matter. 8. Ethics and Psychology. Inasmuch as the facts of ethics are not isolated and independent, but are connected with the rest of the world, it is natural that the science of ethics should stand in some relation to the other sciences. If ethics is concerned with human beings, it will necessarily have something to do with the science of human nature. If ethics has to examine the conduct of man, and if conduct is not merely physical movement, but the outward expression, or sign, or aspect, of states of consciousness, and if the important thing in ethics is the fact that human beings judge of things in a certain way, then, of course, ethics is bound to depend, in a large measure, upon psychology. Psychology analyzes, classifies, and explains states of consciousness. Although all such states are of interest to the moralist, some of them require especial attention from him. The so-called ethical sentiments, the feeling of obligation, etc., are mental phenomena, and as such must be analyzed and explained by him; and they cannot be treated apart from the rest of consciousness. Thus, when the ethicist analyzes and describes the conscience, he |