To the former class—that of the natural or descriptive sciences—belong all the sciences of nature and of man as a natural being. Psychology has recently taken its place in this group of sciences, re-asserting the Aristotelian view of its vocation and method as a 'natural science,' dealing with the process of human experience.[1] Ethics, on the other hand, is, like logic and aesthetics, a normative or appreciative science—a science of value. These three sciences deal with our critical judgments, as distinguished from our factual judgments; they endeavor to systematize these judgments by deducing them from a common standard of value, a final criterion of appreciation. As it is the business of logic and of aesthetics respectively to interpret and explain our judgments of intellectual and of aesthetic value, so it is the business of ethics to interpret and explain our judgments of moral value. The question of logic is: What is the True? or, What is the ultimate standard of intellectual judgment? The question of aesthetics is: What is the Beautiful? or, What is the ultimate standard in judgments of taste? The question of ethics is: What is the Good? or, What is the ultimate standard of practical judgment or judgment about conduct? Our several judgments, so far as they are consistent with one another, about the value of thoughts, of feelings, and of actions, are reducible to a common denominator of Truth, of Beauty, and of Goodness. The discovery of this common denominator of intellectual, of aesthetic, and of moral judgment, and the construction of the system of principles which these judgments, when made coherent and self-consistent, constitute, is the task of the three normative sciences,—logic, aesthetics, and ethics.
So long as the distinction between a natural and a normative science is clearly realized, there is no reason why we should not recognize both a natural science and a normative science of ethics. Indeed, it must be admitted that the former is the propaedeutic to the latter. What we may call the natural his-
- ↑ Economics, on the contrary, shows some signs of resuming its affiliation to the normative sciences, through its dissatisfaction with the extreme abstractness of the conception of the 'economic man.'
