222 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 
sciously either normative or descriptive in his treatment of the problems 
of individual conduct? If conduct is treated descriptively it is hardly, 
in the older sense at any rate, under the categories of good and bad: 
that is to say, the theory of values is precisely the object of investigation 
and must not be allowed to enter subjectively into the judgments of the 
investigator. We do not say that a ray of light takes an evil course in 
passing through a tumbler of water, but only that it takes a deflected 
course. Any other attitude would be as unscientific, however pleasing 
and natural, as swearing at the hammer, or the dull carving-knife, or 
the refractory collar-button. So far as scientific description goes, a 
human act, such as killing a man, is a resultant of forces which follow 
the line of least resistance; and, objectionable as this may be to peda- 
gogical or therapeutical ethics, it is a conception absolutely essential 
to clear reasoning in descriptive ethics. The purely scientific attitude 
is the best in this subject. The aesthetic attitude of enthusiasm for 
one’s material seems harmless. But the moral attitude is the worst 
attitude in which ethics in any scientific sense can be approached. 
No one would write such a sentence as the following: Metabolism 
arose chiefly as a kind of enlarged anabolism: at first man must have 
been chiefly, if not wholly, anabolic, but very soon a time came when 
anabolic hoarding no longer served its ends, and a healthy activity 
required each body to bring itself to bear upon external objects in a 
cheerful activity. When a physicist speaks of the positive and negative 
aspects of an electric current he does not conceive them as two separate 
entities which can as such, and relatively, arise and extend, or decline 
and contract. He may, of course, say that men are now using electric 
appliances in a vastly more complicated and extensive manner than 
ever before. There is no harm in the words anabolism and negative 
electricity. They are harmless, necessary abstractions without which and 
their like no academic work could proceed and no scientific control of 
nature be achieved. The harm is in treating them as spooks from Pla- 
tonic cloisters of monastic Europe. In the same way, if conduct follows 
the laws of least resistance, altruism can no more arise than metabolism, 
or positive electricity or repulsion of bodies. It is only the abstraction 
that can arise and be extended by analysis. 
