[251] What I understand by the “normative idea of ethical science” will become more apparent as I proceed. I may as well state, however, that I look upon the distinction between the “descriptive” ideals of science and the “normative” character of the ideals of the ethical and the socio-political sciences as both fundamental and far-reaching. There are _two_ things, as it were, that constitute what we might call the subject-matter of philosophy---“facts” and “ideals”; or, rather, it is the synthesis and reconciliation of these two orders of reality that constitute the supreme problem of philosophy. It is with the description of facts and of the laws of the sequences of things that the “methodology” of science and of Pragmatism is in the main concerned. And it is because Pragmatism has hitherto shown itself unable to rise above the descriptive and hypothetical science of the day to the ideals of the normative sciences (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) that it is an imperfect philosophy of reality as we know it, or of the different orders of reality. [252] Cf. Professor Ward in _Naturalism and Agnosticism_ (vol. ii. p. 155): “What each one immediately deals with in his own experience is, I repeat, objective reality in the most fundamental sense.” [253] _Introduction to Science_, p. 137. [254] “But if the primitive Amoebae gave rise ‘in the natural course of events’ to higher organisms and these to higher, until there emerged the supreme Mammal, _who by and by had a theory of it all_, then the primitive Amoebae which had in them the promise and the potency of all this _were very wonderful Amoebae indeed_. There must have been more in them than met the eye! _We must stock them, with initiatives at least. We are taking a good deal as ‘given.’_” [Italics mine.]--J. H. Thomson, _Introduction to Science_, p. 137. [255] See Westermarck, vol. i. pp. 74, 93, 117, and chapter iii. generally. The sentence further down in respect of the permanent fact of the moral consciousness is from Hobhouse, vol. ii. p. 54. As instances of the latter, Hobhouse talks of things like the “purity of the home, truthfulness, hospitality, help”, etc., in Iran, of the doctrine of Non-Resistance in Lao Tsze, of the high conception of personal righteousness revealed in the _Book of the Dead_, of the contributions of monotheism to ethics, etc. etc. [256] Cf. p. 167.