56 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 



began, in the Middle Ages, as a branch of ethics, 

 though, as he hastened to show, it soon got into 

 better association. Well, the same company was 

 once kept by all the sciences, mathematical and 

 physical as well as social. According to all ac 

 counts it was the integrity of the number one and 

 the rectitude of the square that attracted the 

 attention of Pythagoras to arithmetic and geom 

 etry as promising fields of study. Astronomy was 

 the projected picture book of a cosmic object les 

 son in morals, Dante s transcript of which is none 

 the less literal because poetic. If physics alone re 

 mained outside the moral fold, while noble essences 

 redeemed chemistry, occult forces blessed physi 

 ology, and the immaterial soul exalted psychology, 

 physics is the exception that proves the rule: mat 

 ter was so inherently immoral that no high-minded 

 science would demean itself by contact with it. 



If we do not join with many in lamenting the 

 stripping from nature of those idealistic properties 

 in which animism survived, if we do not mourn the 

 secession of the sciences from ethics, it is because 

 the abandonment by intelligence of a fixed and 

 static moral end was the necessary precondition of 

 a free and progressive science of both things and 

 morals ; because the emancipation of the sciences 

 from ready made, remote, and abstract values was 

 necessary to make the sciences available for creat 

 ing and maintaining more and specific values here 



