Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/513

Till: NOIIMAI, SKI.K, KTC. is j,'ood without qualification is, so far indeed as he actually succeeds in his intention of characterising this good without reference to the a posteriori or material complement required for its realisation or rather, if one might coin the won I, phenomenalisation, completely ultra-scientific or metaphysi- cal in his mode of conceiving the ethical Norm, and cannot strictly be said to have made herein any contribution what- ever to Ethics in its distinctive capacity of a science. I am not denying that ethical practice presupposes the existence of a universally Desirable in common with all practice, all exertion of the will, whether displayed in regard to conduct, to science, or to artistic production. I am merely asserting that ethical science, regarded as the specific mass of organ- ised experience in the light of which I do not say because of which ethical practice is most rationally carried on, is not directly, or at any rate not primarily, concerned with this absolutely constant formal element, but must rather attempt to generalise the distinctive bulk of relatively con- stant content in the ethically Desired which makes it charac- teristically and exclusively that. In other words, the Norm actually contemplated and studied not prescribed, for it is not the business of science to prescribe by ethical science as such must always be a complex of more of less transitory features, idealised according to the perpetual laws governing all idealisation, but not otherwise of perpetual validity ; and this complex it will be an especial function of the science in question to formulate, that is, to reduce to relative form or consistency, by a survey and comparison of the moral ideals of man in their shifting variety and growth. The actual, that is, actually possible Best or Normal of the race of you and me and the future generations, when all allow- ance has been made for the humanity common to us is a progressive, or at all events a moving and altering, Normal. A fixed Normal may exist in ' heaven ' or in that travesty of heaven, Mr. Spence's millennial state of absolute (though ' moving ') social equilibrium ; but it is not for us. No man ever taught another how to amend his ways by dwelling on that bare concept. He might indeed have in some sense taught him that he must, though as it were indirectly by touching his emotions and firing his imagination. But this, though undoubtedly a good work even so, cannot be the work of Art so far as it is based on the sciences. Bather call it if you will the work of Beligion or whatever else you are prepared to call the ennobling effect of Metaphysics as it reacts on Life. The actual Best for us, then, loosely summating this Better and that Better as at any time it