slight advantage of being recent or even present terms, open to our observation in all their complexity,—complete as they are, and not schematized as they may have been. "The significance of conscious or spiritual values cannot be made out by direct inspection, nor yet by physical dissection and recomposition. They are, therefore, outside the scope of science except so far as amenable to historic method" (p. 123). Note the disjunction: "direct inspection" and "physical dissection and recomposition" are the only methods of non-historical science. Surely this needs proof; or, if by definition "direct inspection" is made to cover its side of the dichotomy, we certainly need evidence of its helplessness in the field of ethics. From one point of view, the proposition is almost self-contradictory. For if direct inspection be intrinsically incompetent, then the historical method cannot even be attempted. A beginning by direct inspection must be made somewhere in the historical series; if not in the complex present, then in the relatively simple (but dimly seen) past. The direct method is then not intrinsically incompetent, but may only be inadequate to the relative complexity of contemporary morals. But if even this be true, it is none the less a surprising proposition, in view of the great mass of ethical theory which it wholly discredits, and extraordinarily good evidence must be forthcoming, if the world is to be convinced of it.
And yet, in one sense, the proposition is palpably true,—in the very modest and temperate sense, that ethical research cannot afford to neglect any promising instrument of analysis; that no one method has elicited, or will probably succeed in eliciting, the whole truth; and that each new point of view means a new perspective which brings into clear vision something that was before obscured or concealed. So we should say of the introspective and evolutionary methods of psychology, that introspection, whether favored or not by experimental conditions, has revealed much, indeed, and will doubtless reveal much more; but that genetic psychology, too, has its distinctive powers and honors; that, in particular, certain problems lend themselves more readily to introspective, and certain others to evolutionary treatment.
After all, evolutionary ethics is not so much a science as the hope of a science. We must be on our guard against too extreme statements either of its accomplishments or of its potentialities. "Just as experiment transforms a brute physical fact into a relatively luminous series of changes, so evolutionary method applied to a moral fact does not leave us either with a mere animal instinct on the one side, or with a spiritual categorical imperative on the other. It reveals to us a single
