Note 251 — Chapter VI · PRAGMATISM AS HUMANISM

What I understand by the “normative idea of ethical science” will become more apparent as I proceed. I may as well state, however, that I look upon the distinction between the “descriptive” ideals of science and the “normative” character of the ideals of the ethical and the socio-political sciences as both fundamental and far-reaching. There are two things, as it were, that constitute what we might call the subject-matter of philosophy—-“facts” and “ideals”; or, rather, it is the synthesis and reconciliation of these two orders of reality that constitute the supreme problem of philosophy. It is with the description of facts and of the laws of the sequences of things that the “methodology” of science and of Pragmatism is in the main concerned. And it is because Pragmatism has hitherto shown itself unable to rise above the descriptive and hypothetical science of the day to the ideals of the normative sciences (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) that it is an imperfect philosophy of reality as we know it, or of the different orders of reality.