666 EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 



those ideals, judgments, and acts which constitute moral life. His 

 interest, it is a truism to say, is not in the history of each individual 

 judgment, but in the relation of these judgments and acts to the 

 ideal which coexists in the mind of their subject. It is the exist- 

 ence of these ideals, together with the sense of realization or failure, 

 and its consequent emotion, which makes the science of ethics 

 possible; and its task is first to determine the content of the ideal, 

 and secondly to give an account of its historical evolution. With 

 the completion of this analysis the work of the ethical student comes 

 to an end. It is not true that he has a further or independent func- 

 tion, such as the establishment of a criterion of moral values and 

 the apportioning of praise and blame in connection with the conduct 

 under consideration. A comparative study of the moral ideals which 

 obtain among the various races of mankind is indeed within the 

 limits of his task; but an estimate other than this, such as the rank- 

 ing of ends as absolute ethical ideals, is not a scientific procfess, but 

 either an individual moral act expressing personal convictions, or a 

 metaphysical speculation as to the place of the various goods of life 

 in an ultimate system of reality. 



To these sciences, whose subject-matter is the various norms of 

 human conscious life, experimental psychology contributes directly 

 and largely. In a word, it gives intelligible order to the content and 

 developmental history of the various ideals which govern the 

 actions and judgments of man in matters of feeling, conduct, and 

 faith. In the absence of such a psychological analysis, I cannot con- 

 ceive how the sciences of ethics, esthetics, and religion could ever 

 be put upon a sound basis. Without it the literature of these depart- 

 ments of thought would consist of a mass of dogmas which, while 

 susceptible of psychological rationalization, must present to the 

 philosopher a series of contradictions irreconcilable with his funda- 

 mental assumptions. Under the concept of a descriptive science 

 this impasse is avoided, since the various ideals are then treated 

 simply as historical phenomena, and divergence of type involves 

 no contradiction, but indicates only variety of nature and environ- 

 mental conditions. 



Experimental study has both given an historical content to the 

 forms of moral law and brought about a rearrangement in our 

 judgments of human action; and an analogous reconstruction 

 has taken place in regard to religious experience. It follows that if 

 we relinquish the concept of unconditional responsibility and sup- 

 plement the principle of the moral will by a recognition of the 

 significance of the system of external conditions under which it 

 finds manifestation, our whole conception of the nature of ethical 

 and religious development, and of crime, wrong, and sin, will thereby 

 be affected; while educational, therapeutic, and preventive measures 



