itself to a very considerable extent to such interpretation, the assumption of ‘eternal’ laws would have served our purposes as little as those of astrology, chiromancy, necromancy, and catoptromancy. What, however, must be asserted is that this assumption is not an ultimate term in the explanation of the world.
That does not, of course, matter to Science, which is not concerned with such ultimate explanation, and for which the assumption is at all events ultimate enough. But it does matter to philosophy that the ultimate theoretic assumption should have a methodological character. To say that we assume the truth of abstraction because we wish to attain certain ends, is to subordinate theoretic ‘truth’ to a teleological implication: to say that, the assumption once made, its truth is ‘proved’ by its practical working, by the way in which it stands the test of experience, is to assert this same subordination only a little less directly. For the question of the ‘practical working’ of a truth will always ultimately be found to resolve itself into the question whether we can live by it.
In any case, then, it appears that scientific knowledge is not an ultimate and unanalysable term in the explanation of things: Science subordinates itself to the needs and ends of life alike whether we regard its origin — practical necessity, or its criterion — practical utility. But if so, the procedure of Science can no longer be quoted in support of the attempt to found our ultimate philosophy upon abstract and ‘eternal’ universals. If the abstraction from time, place and individuality is conditioned by practical aims, the next inquiry must evidently concern the nature of these practical aims, to which all theoretic knowledge is ultimately subsidiary. And if those aims can be formed into a connected and coherent system, it will be to the discipline which achieves this that we shall look for an ultimate account of the world. Is there then a science which gives an orderly account of the ends of life that are or should be aimed at? Surely Ethics is as much of a science as abstract metaphysics, and if it be the science of ultimate ends, it seems to follow that our ultimate metaphysic must be ethical.
Let us consider next what the attitude of such an ethical metaphysic would be to the metaphysical pretensions of abstract universals and the time-process respectively. It seems clear, in the first place, that practical aims, or a system thereof, do not easily lend themselves to statement in terms of abstract universals. For an end or purpose seems to be intrinsically the affair of a finite individual in space and time, and the attempt to regard the timeless, immutable and universal as possessed of ends seems to meet with insuperable difficulties. If, therefore, the ultimate explanation of the world is to be in terms of ends,
