THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF MORALITY

There is not a single system of ethics which has not developed from an initial idea in which its entire development was contained implicitly. Some believe that man possesses that idea at birth. Others, by contrast, believe that it evolves more or less slowly in the course of history. But for both schools of thought, for empiricists as well as for rationalists, this idea is the sole reality in ethics. As for the details of legal and moral rules, these are treated as if they had no existence in their own right but were merely applications of this fundamental notion to the particular circumstances of life, varied somewhat to suit the different cases. Hence, the subject-matter of the science of ethics cannot be this system of precepts, which has no reality, but must be the idea from which the precepts are derived and of which they are only diverse applications. Furthermore, all the problems ordinarily raised in ethics refer not to things but to ideas. Moralists examine the idea of law, or the ethical idea, not the nature of law and ethics. They have not yet arrived at the very simple truth that, as our representations of physical things are derived from these things themselves and express them more or less exactly, so our idea of ethics derives from the observable manifestation of the rules that are functioning under our eyes and reproduces this schematically. It follows that these rules, and not our schematic idea of them, should be the subject-matter of science, just as actual physical bodies, and not the layman's idea of them, constitute the subject-matter of physics.