METAPHYSICS AND THE OTHER SCIENCES 235 



it would become useless if the whole past and future course of events 

 were from the first familiar to us. And, incidentally it may be ob- 

 served, it is for the same reason untrue of inference, though true of 

 inductive inference, that it is essentially a passage from the known 

 to the unknown. 



In dealing with the relation of metaphysics to the formal sciences 

 generally, the great difficulty which confronts us is that of determin- 

 ing exactly the boundaries which separate one from another. Among 

 such pure sciences we have by universal admission to include at 

 least two, pure formal logic and pure mathematics, as distinguished 

 from the special applications of logic and mathematics to an empiri- 

 cal material. Whether we ought also to recognize ethics and aesthet- 

 ics, in the sense of the general determination of the nature of the 

 good and the beautiful, as non-empirical sciences, seems to be a more 

 difficult question. It seems clear, for instance, that ethical discus- 

 sions, such as bulk so largely in our contemporary literature, as to what 

 is the right course of conduct under various conditions, are concerned 

 throughout with an empirical material, namely, the existing pecu- 

 liarities of human nature as we find it, and must therefore be regarded 

 as capable only of an empirical and therefore problematic solution. 

 Accordingly I was at one time myself tempted to regard ethics as 

 a purely empirical science, and even published a lengthy treatise 

 in defense of that point of view and in opposition to the whole 

 Kantian conception of the possibility of a constructive Metaphysik 

 der Sitten. It seems, however, possible to hold that in the question 

 "What do we mean by good?" as distinguished from the question 

 " What in particular is it right to do? " there is no more of a reference 

 to the empirical facts of human psychology than in the question 

 "What do we mean .by truth?" and that there must therefore be 

 a non-empirical answer to the problem. The same would of course 

 hold equally true of the question "What is beauty?" If there are, 

 however, such a pure science of ethics and again of aesthetics, it 

 must at least be allowed that for the most part these sciences are 

 still undiscovered, and that the ethical and aesthetical results hitherto 

 established are in the main of an empirical nature, and this must 

 be my excuse for confining the remarks of the next two paragraphs 

 to the two great pure sciences of which the general principles may 

 be taken to be now in large measure known. 



That metaphysics and logic should sometimes have been absolutely 

 identified, as for instance by Hegel, will not surprise us when we 

 consider how hard it becomes on the view here defended to draw any 

 hard and fast boundary line between them. For metaphysics, accord- 

 ing to this conception of its scope, deals with the formulation of the 

 self-evident principles implied, in there being such a thing as truth 

 and the deductions which these principles warrant us in drawing. 



