A more distinct meaning will now be seen in the statement that the
utilitarianism which recognizes only the principles of conduct reached
by induction, is but preparatory to the utilitarianism which deduces
these principles from the processes of life as carried on under
established conditions of existence.
§22. Thus, then, is justified the allegation made at the outset,
that, irrespective of their distinctive characters and their special
tendencies, all the current methods of ethics have one general
defect--they neglect ultimate causal connections. Of course I do not
mean that they wholly ignore the natural consequences of actions; but
I mean that they recognize them only incidentally. They do not erect
into a method the ascertaining of necessary relations between causes
and effects, and deducing rules of conduct from formulated statement of
them.
Every science begins by accumulating observations, and presently
generalizes these empirically; but only when it reaches the stage
at which its empirical generalizations are included in a rational
generalization, does it become developed science. Astronomy has already
passed through its successive stages: first collections of facts; then
inductions from them; and lastly deductive interpretations of these, as
corollaries from a universal principle of action among masses in space.
Accounts of structures and tabulations of strata, grouped and compared,
have led gradually to the assigning of various classes of geological
changes to igneous and aqueous actions; and it is now tacitly admitted
that Geology becomes a science proper, only as fast as such changes
are explained in terms of those natural processes which have arisen in
the cooling and solidifying earth, exposed to the sun's heat and the
action of the moon upon its ocean. The science of life has been, and
is still, exhibiting a like series of steps; the evolution of organic
forms at large is being affiliated on physical actions in operations
from the beginning; and the vital phenomena each organism presents are
coming to be understood as connected sets of changes, in parts formed
of matters that are affected by certain forces and disengage other
forces. So is it with mind. Early ideas concerning thought and feeling
ignored everything like cause, save in recognizing those effects of
habits which were forced on men's attention and expressed in proverbs;
but there are growing up interpretations of thought and feeling as
correlates of the actions and reactions of a nervous structure, that
is influenced by outer changes and works in the body adapted changes:
the implication being that Psychology becomes a science as fast as
these relations of phenomena are explained as consequences of ultimate
principles. Sociology, too, represented down to recent times only by
stray ideas about social organization, scattered through the masses of
worthless gossip furnished us by historians, is coming to be recognized
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