nature of these facts is, in and for itself, a judgment as to the act to be done. The question is not: What is the probability that this act will result in the balance of maximum pleasure; it is not, What general rule can we hunt up under which to bring this case. It is simply, What is this case? The moral act is not that which satisfies some far-away principle, hedonistic or transcendental. It is that which meets the present actual situation. Difficulties, indeed, arise, but they are the difficulties of resolving a complex case. They are intellectual, not moral. The case made out, the moral end stands forth" (Outlines of Ethics, pp. 134-5). As Professor Dewey has it elsewhere, the content of the moral end "is concrete to the core, including every detail of conduct; and this not in a rigid formula, but in the movement of life." We may cordially assent to the contention which these quotations illustrate without necessarily adopting the particular view of the End as 'self-realization' (i.e., the 'realization of a community of persons') upheld by the writers that I have referred to. The truth and significance of the fact that man is only moral and even only human 'in society'—i.e., when living in the presence of his fellows—may be fully acknowledged without turning the admission into an ontological dogma that society is an 'organic unity' in the sense in which these and other writers maintain it, or that society can ever become so.
The result to which we have so far been led is, that Ethics becomes a link or transition between Psychology and Ontology: its business is to emphasize those facts of mind which support the teleological view, and which help us to define the ideal.[1] It has a negative function, inasmuch as it will exclude, as false, certain principles of individual, social, and political action that are frequently met with; it has a positive function, inasmuch as it shows that in every situation there is a demand made upon us, there and then, to do our best.
Note.—It must be observed that, for the social side of conduct, important practical guidance may be derived by the
- ↑ The implications of this statement will be brought out in the following sections.
