284 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
up ends, in conceiving obligations. If moral science has any constructive value, it must provide standpoints and working instrumentalities for the more adequate per- formance of these tasks. Shall we say that a defined and critical knowledge of the origin, history, and destiny of such matters in the past life of humanity is aside from the mark in our present situation ?
Intuitionalism, as ordinarily conceived, makes the ethical belief a brute fact, because unrelated. Its very lack of genetic relationship to the situation in which it appears condemns it to isolation. This isolation logically makes it impossible to credit it with objective validity. The genetic theory holds that the content embodied in any so-called intuition is a response to a given active situation ; that it arises, develops, and operates somehow in reference to this situation. This functional reference estab- lishes in advance some kind of a relationship to objective conditions, and hence some presumption of validity. If the "intuition " persists, it is, within certain limits, because the situation persists. The probability is that it continues in existence simply because it continues to be necessary in function. The presumption or probability, however, must not be pushed too far. It is a well-known fact that habits endure and project themselves after the conditions which originally generated them pass over, and that under such circumstances the habits become sources of error and even of hallucina- tion. The point of the genetic method is, then, that it shows relationships, and thereby at once guarantees and defines meaning. A given belief or intuition represents, as regards its content, a cross-section of a historic process. No wonder it becomes meaningless and obstructive when the static section is taken as if it were a complete and individualized reality.
Empiricism is no more historic in character than is intuitionalism. Empiricism is concerned with the moral idea or belief as a grouping or association of various ele- mentary feelings. It regards the idea simply as a complex state which is to be explained by resolving it into its elementary constituents. By its logic, both the com- plex and the elements are isolated from a historic context. The genetic method determines the worth or significance of the belief by considering the place that it occupied in a developing series; the empirical method by referring it to its components. Elementary feelings or sensations, as the empiricist deals with them, have no inherent or intrinsic time-reference at all. Such reference is a purely external matter that attaches to the accidental way in which one of these elements happens to fall in with others; accidental because its position of antecedence or con- sequence is something lying wholly outside of the element itself. The empirical and the genetic methods thus imply a very different relationship between the moral state, idea, or belief, and objective reality. From the genetic standpoint, the moral idea is essentially an attitude that arises in the individual in response to the practical situa- tion in which he is involved. It is the estimate the individual puts upon that situa- tion. It arises as a response to a stimulus, and its worth is found in its success, as response, in doing the particular work demanded of it. The empirical theory holds that the idea arises as a reflex of some existing object or fact. Hence the test of its objectivity is the faithfulness with which it reproduces that object as copy.
The empirical method holds that the belief or idea is generated by a process of repetition or cumulation ; the genetic method, by a process of adjustment. The empiricist holds that conscious customs are generated by the persistence of biological habits, and that moral practices form the cumulative effect of the customs. But more instinctive acts simply make instinct more instinctive; more acts of habit just harden an original custom. It is only through failure in the adequate working of the instinct or habit failure from the standpoint of adjustment that history, change in quality or values, is made. Simple repetition of acts of caring for the young, however long continued, would not awaken a consciousness of obligation, or of virtue, or of any moral value, as long as the acts were habitually performed just because there would be no need for a transformation. Some failure of instinct created the demand for a conscious attention to the nurture of the young. Only through this conscious attitude and its tension against some instinct could an ethical adaptation arise out of a physio- logical adaptation.
This, then, is the case for the moral significance of the genetic method : it unites the present situation with its accepted customs, beliefs, moral ideals, hopes, and aspi- rations, with the past. It sees the moral process as a whole, and yet in perspective
