frankly anthropocentric as the natural sciences are cosmocentric. Whether or not, in our ultimate interpretation of reality, we must shift our centre, is a question which metaphysics must answer.[1]
The fact that it is the genius and function of the normative sciences to transcend the actual, and to judge its value in terms of the ideal, doubtless brings these sciences nearer than the natural sciences to metaphysics or ultimate philosophy. For while the natural sciences are content with the discovery of the phenomenal order, the order of the facts themselves, even a naturalistic or utilitarian ethics, for example, is an evaluation of human life in terms of a standard or ideal, viz., pleasure. A judgment of worth is speculative—we might almost say metaphysical—in a sense in which a judgment of fact is not speculative or metaphysical. Its point of view is transcendental, not empirical. It follows that the science which organizes such judgments into a system is also transcendental, and, in that sense, metaphysical. Yet such a science is not strictly to be identified with metaphysics, for three reasons. First, it agrees with common-sense in assuming the validity of the judgments of value, whose system it is seeking to construct. Secondly, it abstracts one set of judgments of value—the logical, or the aesthetic, or the ethical—from the rest of the judgments of value. Thirdly, it abstracts the judgments of value from the judgments of fact. Now it is the business of metaphysics to
- ↑ Cf. Mr. Balfour (loc. cit., pp. 337-8): "The general propositions which really lie at the root of any ethical system must themselves be ethical, and can never be either scientific or metaphysical. In other words, if a proposition announcing obligation require proof at all, one term of that proof must always be a proposition announcing obligation, which itself requires no proof. ... There is no artifice by which an ethical statement can be evolved from a scientific or metaphysical proposition, or from any combination of such; and whenever the reverse appears to be the fact, it will always be found that the assertion which seems to be the basis of the ethical superstructure, is in reality merely the 'minor' of a syllogism, of which the 'major' is the desired ethical principle." It should be noted that Mr. Balfour uses the term science to designate natural science exclusively. What I have called a normative science, he would apparently include in philosophy. T. H. Green and recently Mr. C. F. D'Arcy (A Short Study of Ethics) have insisted upon a metaphysical derivation of ethics. Cf. Professor Dewey's discussion of 'the metaphysical study of ethics' (Psychological Review, vol. iii, pp. 181-8).
