Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/259

246 W. L. DAVIDSON : facilitating the grouping of members according to their greatest number of real affinities and of fixed resemblances. in. But now a difficulty arises with respect to Biological grouping, yet not by any means confined to it, a difficulty real and very perplexing wherever we have a complicated classification to deal with, and whatever be the materials in hand or the sphere of operation. No member of a complex system can have all its relations expressed by being placed in any one position in a linear scheme, however carefully located. While you may succeed in showing its connexion with those immediately above it and those immediately below it and (where you have a graded system involving co- ordinations) with those immediately around it, you cannot exhibit its many resemblances to distant and seemingly unconnected groups, or exhaust its points of affinity or dependence. Hence the necessity of frequent re-grouping of a subordinate kind, with a special view to helping out the general classification and remedying its defects. ^ Let us revert for illustration to the classification of the Sciences, and let us pick out one science for the special pur- pose of exhibiting its various kinds of relationship. Ethics will suit our purpose admirably, its bearings and con- nexions being manifold and the instance typical. As Ethics is the science of human Character in reference to an ideal standard, it is properly enough regarded as a branch of the Mental sciences. But the mental sciences are numerous psychology, sociology, metaphysics, &c. ; and they stand to Ethics in all sorts of relations causation, dependence, implication, &c. These relations must be clearly understood and schematically expressed. Take, first, Ethics and Psychology. Now, as Ethics has to do in great part with character, and as character is a com- bination of certain volitional, emotive and intellectual elements, Ethics, in this point of view, must be regarded as a branch of psychology. The methods of the one science are the methods of the other also they are introspection and objective observation ; and Morality is a department of man's nature needing to be inductively studied, like all similar departments. But, further still, psychological doc- trines find, many of them, their application in Ethics, and their meaning is only made all the clearer by their being presented in an ethical setting. Thus, the leading laios of psychology those that give to it its distinctive feature and constitute indeed its scientific value are those relating to