POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 325 



Conclusion 



By way of summary of our statement of the relation which polit- 

 ical philosophy bears to other fields of speculative inquiry it may 

 be said that metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy constitute 

 the three divisions into which any general philosophical system is 

 logically divisible. By metaphysics are determined the nature and 

 essential attributes of men as rational moral beings. Upon its con- 

 clusions are based the principles which the ethicist declares. Finally, 

 the results reached by the ethicist are in turn those which it should 

 be the aim of all political life to realize. Thus, to state the sequence 

 in other words, metaphysics determines the possibility of human 

 freedom, ethics lays down the principles by which it should be regu- 

 lated, and politics ascertains the means through which those princi- 

 ples may best receive recognition and enforcement. Thus, the final 

 aim of philosophy is fulfilled. Without ethics and politics, meta- 

 physics is reduced to useless imaginings. Without metaphysics, 

 ethics has no foundation for its premises, and without politics it is 

 without the means of securing a realization of the aims which it 

 declares desirable. Without metaphysics and ethics, politics is 

 unable either to determine the relative values of different possible 

 lines of public policy, or to establish grounds upon which political 

 obedience may rightly be demanded. 



By way of final word, the speaker would repeat what he has had 

 occasion in an earlier paper to declare, that, though abundantly 

 justified by its practical fruits, the greatest incentive to the study 

 of political theory is that pure intellectual delight which is to be 

 obtained from the pursuit of any speculative inquiry. Philosophy 

 is the search for the essentially true, and alone is able to satisfy the 

 mind's insatiable demand for the whence, the how, and, to use a 

 scholastic term, the whatness or quiddity of human phenomena. Its 

 results are, therefore, satisfying apart from their practical value, and 

 its method enticing by giving play to our highest intellectual facul- 

 ties. At all times political speculation has occupied an important 

 place in the general field of philosophy, and has attracted the atten- 

 tion of the greatest minds, from Plato and Aristotle, Augustine 

 and Aquinas, Locke and Spinoza, to Kant and Hegel, Savigny and 

 Austin, Jefferson and Mill. And, when we reflect upon it, what can 

 be more provocative of inquiry than the nature of the corporative 

 control to which all men submit in one form or another, and under 

 which and because of which they have been able to progress from 

 the lowest stages of savagery to the highest attainments of civilized 

 life? What wonder that, apart from the pursuit of practical ends, 

 the greatest minds should have been stirred to its critical examina- 

 tion ! 



