Note 33 — Chapter V · THE IDEAL OF THE WHOLE AND THE ETHICAL MANIFOLD

The term “ethical unit” used above should be found useful. The chemists have found the concept of the atom useful, though no one has ever seen an atom. And all the sciences have recourse to similar inventions,—such as the electron, or the ion, or energy regarded as a substance, and in mathematics the sublimated, space-transcending concepts. Looking through the eyes of science, we are taught to see, underlying the grossest forms of matter, imaginary entities which are well-nigh metaphysical in nature. Science starts from the realm of the sensible, and constructs its super-rarefied devices on mechanical models. Then it leaves the field of the intuitively perceptible, and rises by the path of analogy into realms where the notions with which it operates are no longer imaginable. I do not wish, in speaking of an ethical, invisible, and unimaginable entity, to derive the postulation of this conception from science. The ethical concept transcends wholly the field of sensible experience. It is not discovered by way of analogy. It is frankly and overtly supersensible. It is not exemplified in the effects it produces in the world of volition as the most nearly metaphysical concepts of science are exemplified in the field of phenomena by the recurrences or uniformities which they serve to account for. The ethical concepts are not verified by their results at all, not by recurrences of phenomena, but by the persistence of the effort to attain that which is finitely never attained, and by the more explicit perception of the ideal itself which follows the persistent effort; for as has been shown above, when face to face with fundamental truth, seeing is believing. But I allude to these matters in order to show that the movement in ethical thinking represented by the system which I propose is not contrary to the present-day movement in science, but in line with it, though beyond it. It does not ask leave of science; it does not base its certainty on scientific precedent; but neither does it expect a veto from the lips of science. The worthwhileness of scientific endeavor itself depends at bottom on the sanction which the ideal of the complete carrying out of the reality-producing functions lends to their incomplete execution in the world of the space and time manifold.