THE HOLT-FREUDIAN ETHICS AND THE ETHICS OF ROYCE.
A Studyof the Bearing of Psychological Concepts upon Ethical Theory.
SINCE any scheme of ethics implies a psychology, any original movement in either field will affect the other. Whether or not a psychology recognizes a soul may make comparatively little difference in views of the goal of behavior, provided some changeless law of Karma secures that moral coherence of destiny which is one of the soul's functions. But theories of the will, of consent, and especially of the ranking of various impulses and desires under some 'ruling faculty,' may mark the difference between the Stoic and the Epicurean; and in this case it seems probable that the differences in psychology were largely due to prior differences in moral conviction.
At present, psychology is more independent of ethics than ethics is of psychology. But if psychology declines to deal with the will and its components, ethics will be obliged to develop this part of psychology for itself. Such home-grown psychologies will lack fertility; they are not wrought in sufficient detachment from the business of their application.[1] In Royce's ethical thought, the psychological basis was neither taken over bodily from any contemporary doctrine (though the influence of James is marked) nor was it developed as an independent science; but on the other hand it was not developed in the first place as an element in an ethical system. When William James distinguished among philosophies those that 'run thick' and those that 'run thin,' he included the philosophy of Royce in the former class, because of the omnipresence there of data of experience, largely psychological. For Royce, and indeed for any idealistic
- ↑ This is one of the most serious defects of pragmatism in its bearing upon the arts of thinking and education. It is inclined to argue backward from the perceivable uses of ideas to the ideas themselves, forgetting the vital difference between utility and fertility.
