The spirit of Auguste Comte and Positivism pervades this book, and one leaves it with an impression of the author's special dislike for metaphysics and conceptual ethics. His preference is for facts and the method of science, not for fancies and the speculations of philosophers.
But Mr. Hayes does not give his opponents, the metaphysicians, any real chance to have their say. He tells us that "the wallowing of epistemology never arrived at any positive conclusions. ... Of all the futile exercises of great intelligence, the most preposterous is that by which men have tried to use their faculties to test their faculties." This is his answer to metaphysics; Kant and Bergson, who deny the all-inclusive validity of the scientific method, are thus dismissed. But Mr. Hayes has not heard all that Kant and Bergson have to say; he has forgotten that Kant's argument aims to show, against the sceptic, how natural science is possible, and that neither Kant nor Bergson denies the validity of science within its sphere. It is not with them, as it is with Mr. Hayes, a question of metaphysics or science, but a question of metaphysics and science. Both can exist in the same mind and the same universe. Mr. Hayes, however, being true to his positivistic bias, finds metaphysics anathema, and believes that when it comes in at the door science must fly out of the window.
Unfortunately he falls, thus, into the subtler error of accepting the metaphysics of science and common sense. To be unconscious of one's metaphysical assumptions is not to be without them. The 'natural science point of view' turns out to be a belief in determinism, and an uncritical respect for causes and effects—the most metaphysical things in the world. Mr. Hayes asks if Kant's and Bergson's belief in 'uncaused freedom' is not the echo of earlier prejudices; and in answer they might well ask him if his belief in causes and effects is not also the echo of prejudice of an overweening faith in Science, with a capital 'S.' "There is no science," says Mr. Hayes, "without explanation; and there is no explanation except causal." This sounds a bit old fashioned when we hear Poincaré and Russell proclaiming that modern science no longer has use for the concept of cause.
The book opens with a chapter on the need of a scientific or naturalistic ethics. The author then points out the effect of religious thoughts on conduct, especially the semi-religious thought of "the Cooperative Enterprise," the great social undertaking on which we are engaged. Sociology, which is the study of "the problem of social causation," must deal with questions of value; the sociologist must indicate the direction in which society ought to move, as well as describe its nature and history. In the fourth chapter, Mr. Hayes embarks on the problem of freedom, as the central difficulty in ethics, and discards free-will and indeterminism as the
