THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS 1 



ARGUMENT 



The Place of Conduct in Philosophy : (a) The absolutist reduction of Conduct to 

 appearance ; (b] the pragmatist reaction which makes conduct primary 

 and thought secondary. Is Pragmatism irrationalism ? No, but it 

 explains it by exposing the inadequacy of intellectualism. Ways of 

 reaching Pragmatism (i) by justification of faith against reason, (2) 

 historical, (3) evolutionary. The definition of Pragmatism. Its relation 

 to psychological teleology. The supremacy of Good over True and 

 Real. Kant s Copernican Revolution, and the complication of the 

 question of reality with that of our knowledge. A further similar step 

 necessitated by the purposvieness of actual knowing. The function of 

 the will in cognition. Reality as the response to a will to know, and 

 therefore dependent in part on our action. Consequently (i) reality 

 cannot be indifferent to us; (2) our relations to it quasi-personal; (3) 

 metaphysics quasi-ethical ; (4) Pragmatism as a tonic : the venture of 

 faith and freedom ; (5) the moral stimulus of Pragmatism. 



WHAT has Philosophy to say of Conduct ? Shall it 

 place it high or low, exalt it on a pedestal for the 

 adoration of the world or drag it in the mire to be 



1 This essay, originally an Ethical Society address, appeared in the July 

 1903 number of the International Journal of Ethics, It is now reprinted with a 

 few additions, the chief of which is the long note on pp. 11-12. Its title has of course 

 been objected to as putting the cart before the horse. To which it is easy to reply 

 that nowadays it is no longer impracticable to use a motor car for the removal 

 of a dead horse. And the paradox implied in the title is, of course, intentional. 

 It is a conscious inversion of the tedious and unprofitable disquisitions on the 

 metaphysical basis of this, that, and the other, which an erroneous conception of 

 philosophical method engenders. They are wrong in method, because we have 

 not de facto a science of first principles of unquestionable truth from which we 

 can start to derive the principles of the special sciences. The converse of this 

 is the fact, viz. that our first principles are postulated by the needs, and slowly 

 secreted by the labours, of the special sciences, or of such preliminary exercises 

 of our intelligence as build up the common-sense view of life. 



And so what my title means is, not an attempt to rest the final synthesis 

 upon a single science, but rather that among the contributions of the special 

 sciences to the final evaluation of experience that of the highest, viz. ethics, has, 

 and must have, decisive weight. 



B 



