Mabch 2, 19C0.] 



SCIENCE. 



531 



see it objectively, not merely in relation to 

 our traditional habits, vague aspirations 

 and capricious desires. We are able to see 

 clearly the factors which shape it, and there- 

 fore to get an idea of how it may be modi- 

 fied. The assumption of an identical re- 

 lationship of physics and psychology to 

 practical life is justified. Our freedom of 

 action comes through its statement in terms 

 of necessity. By this translation our con- 

 trol is enlarged, our powers are directed, 

 our energy conserved, our aims illuminated. 



The school is an especially favorable 

 place in which to study the availability of 

 psychology for social pi-actice, because in 

 the school the formation of a certain type 

 of social personality, with a certain attitude 

 and equipment of working powers, is the ex- 

 press aim. In idea at least no other pur- 

 pose restricts or compromises the dominance 

 of the single purpose. Such is not the case 

 in business, politics and the professions. 

 All these have upon their surface, taken 

 directly, other ends to serve. In many in- 

 stances these other aims are of far greater 

 immediate importance ; the ethical result 

 is subordinate or even incidental. Yet as 

 it profiteth a man nothing to gain the whole 

 world and lose his own self, so indirectly 

 and ultimately all these other social insti- 

 tutions must be judged by the contribution 

 which they make to the value of human life. 

 Other ends may be immediately uppermost, 

 but these ends must in turn be means ; they 

 must subserve the interests of conscious life 

 or else stand condemned. 



In other words, the moment we apply 

 an ethical standard to the consideration of 

 social institutions, that moment they stand 

 on exactly the same level as does the school, 

 viz. : as organs for the increase in depth 

 and area of the realized values of life. In 

 both cases the statement of the mechanism, 

 through which the ethical ends are realized, 

 is not only permissible, but absolutely re- 

 quired. It is not merely incidentally, as a 



grateful addition, to its normal task, that 

 psychology serves us. The essential nature 

 of the standpoint which calls it into exist- 

 ence, and of abstraction which it performs, 

 is to put in our possession the method by 

 which values are introduced and effected in 

 life. The statement of personality as an 

 object; of social relations as a mechanism 

 of stimuli and inhibitions, is precisely the 

 statement of ends in terms of the method of 

 their realization. 



It is remarkable that men are so blind 

 to the futility of a morality which merely 

 blazons ideals, erects standards, asserts law 

 without finding in them any organic pro- 

 vision for their own realization. For ideals 

 are held up to follow ; standards are given 

 to work by ; laws are provided to guide ac- 

 tion. The sole and only reason for their 

 conscious moral statement is, in a word, 

 that they may influence and direct con- 

 duct. If they cannot do this, not merely 

 by accident, but of their own intrinsic na- 

 ture, they are worse than inert. They are 

 impudent impostors and logical self-contra- 

 dictions. 



When men derive their moral ideas and 

 laws from custom, they also realize them 

 through custom ; but when they are in 

 any way divorced from habit and tradi- 

 tion, when they are consciously proclaimed, 

 there must be some substitute for custom 

 as an organ of execution. A^e must know 

 the method of their operation and know it 

 in detail. Otherwise the more earnestly 

 we insist upon our categorial imperatives, 

 and upon their supreme right of control, 

 the more flagi-antly helpless we are as to 

 their actual domination . The fact that con- 

 scious, as distinct from customary, mo- 

 rality and psychology have had a historic 

 parallel march, is just the concrete recogni- 

 tion of the necessary equivalence between 

 ends consciously conceived, and interest in 

 the means upon which the ends depend. 

 We have the same reality stated twice 



