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 purposiveness 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 



1 This essay, originally an Ethical Society address, is reprinted from the 

 July 1903 number of the International Journal of Ethics with some additions, 

 the chief of which is the note on pp. 11-12. Its title seems of course to put the 

 cart before the horse, but it is easy to reply that nowadays it is no longer im 

 practicable to use a motor car for the removal of a dead horse. The paradox 

 is, moreover, 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 all 

 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. Plato certainly failed to deduce the principles of the sciences 

 from his metaphysical Idea of Good, and it may be doubted whether any one 

 has ever really deduced anything from metaphysics. The fact is rather 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. 



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. 



I B 



