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the preachment that if individuals would only cultivate kindly and benevolent sentiments, all social problems would forthwith right themselves. This complacent belief is but an offshoot and echo of a more fundamental assumption, which finds its classical expression in the often quoted words of Adam Smith, which I shall take the liberty of quoting once more. "As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. . . . He intends his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." Why-this is the upshot of the matter-why bother about anything which falls outside of the individual's own clearly defined interests, why concern ourselves over much with the objective ordering of social institutions when nature or the "invisible hand" will take care of society if only individuals take care of themselves? Let each individual pursue his own economic interest, organize and exploit whatever may chance to fall to his hands. Let him apply his science and his intelligence to this restricted, individual region, and then leave the working out of the results to the invisible hand of nature or of God. There is no need, on the basis of such premises, for any scientific knowledge of historical processes and of the objective institutions of society because these fall outside of the area which the individual is to organize and to master. Here is to be found the key to the fundamental

assumptions of our modern social order as it took shape after the decay of the feudal régime. Here is the root of the system of natural liberty, of laissez faire, the belief in the harmony of interests, the distrust of social science, and of any science of man and of history. This is the modern equivalent of the ethics of Stoicism and of Christianity. Indeed, it is possible now to lay bare the historical channels through which the older religious individualism became transmuted into modern economic individualism. Protestantism and, especially in England, Puritanism paved the way for this apotheosis of individual men, and this disbelief in the reality of society, of institutions, and of impersonal processes of history as legitimate objects of descriptive knowledge and intelligent control.

There exists an analogy, an exemplification in miniature of precisely this situation which I have depicted, in the development of those institutions which go by the name of universities, which I may be permitted in this place to point out. Most universities have grown up on the principle of individualism and the belief in the invisible hand. Each unit of the university, each department, has, for the most part, gone its own way, pushed out and pushed forward primarily with reference to the supposed needs and interests of the unit considered by itself. Let each department organize itself, expand and exploit in its own way, the university as a whole, led by an invisible hand, will take care of itself. It is only secondarily and reluctantly that it has begun to dawn upon our minds that it might be well to think about the organization as a whole, to exercise some control over the activities and careers of the various units, to look to the building up of a university or college mind which would check and prune here, incite and stimulate there, institute, in short, a common and unified control over the system as a whole. But to do this runs counter to the ingrained habits of individuals and departments. It

would violate natural rights and vested interests. It would subvert the freedom of instructors to do as they please; it would throw open the privacy of lecture room and blue-books to the scrutiny of deans and committees. But some such thing as this, unthinkable and intolerable as it is, appears to be the only alternative to the still worse evil of educational individualism. For, the system of natural liberty, the reliance upon the invisible hand rather than upon intelligent control, whether within the small world of the university or the larger world of modern society has broken down. It has resulted in chaos. It is in constant danger of providing us with unrelated, useless, and even harmful forms of activity, whether business enterprises or courses of instruction, which have come to exist either because somebody finds them useful means of exploiting his world for his own advantage, or, at best, because of historical accidents which have taken root and determined the future without any reference to the growing needs of the total system viewed in its entirety.

I may appear to have strayed far from my subject and to be perilously near dangerous themes. I have wished thus far to say two things. First, traditional ethics, through its emphasis on the distinction between a descriptive and normative science, has deliberately renounced the hope of exercising an intelligent control over social processes similar to that which applied science has made it possible to achieve in man's control over his physical environment. Second, this renunciation has fitted in with, and has played into the hands of, the individualism which allows an individual to organize his private interests, but forbids the formation of any social purpose for the control of men's social environment.

The resulting situation is an impossible one, and for many reasons, some of which I may briefly touch upon. It leaves us with a radical split between two areas of

human experience, the region in which we recognize that no practical endeavor can succeed unless it be based upon scientific knowledge, and another province which we have set aside as one admitting of no such intelligent control, based upon organized knowledge. It is psychologically impossible that such a cleavage should always persist. The total structure of modern civilization cannot remain a house divided against itself.

There is a process which has been going on at an accelerating velocity in modern life and which makes it more and more perilous to leave the structure of social institutions to the free play of individual interests and to rely upon the invisible hand. This process is that of the division of labor, of specialization. In proportion as this increases, the individual ceases, in fact, to be the determining unit. What he does increasingly obtains its value and its meaning in the light of the whole complex structure. His own activity becomes a specialized function. The entire structure comes to be a delicate mechanism, requiring the mutual adjustment of all the parts. The more complex the mechanism is, the greater becomes the need for the conscious guidance of its processes, based upon a knowledge of needs to be met, and the available resources for meeting these needs. Our world is no longer a primitive and pioneer world where an individual can stake out a claim, and then proceed to exploit it in more or less independence of everyone else. This holds good for the world of intellectual achievement, the world of scholars and scientists, no less than for the physical and the social world. As the necessity for intellectual specialization increases, the necessity for coördination and coöperation likewise increases. The difficult task must be essayed of so ordering the scientific and philosophical labor of mankind that the specialized work of any one individual shall perform a useful function, relevant to the advance of knowledge as a whole. Wherever there is division of labor and, in

consequence, the actual existence of a complex mechanism with many parts and many functions, there must be a corresponding social purpose which organizes and controls the various functions in the light of the total requirements and resources.. Otherwise it is inevitable. that the invisible hand of a beneficent providence shall turn out to be the all too visible hand of those who can best scheme and exploit for their own selfish ends.

It is this present situation in which civilization finds itself which sets the task for ethics, an ethics for which I should care to offer an apology. No such ethics exists, or ever will exist, as a finished and completed system. But there is at hand a body of knowledge, as yet but imperfectly organized, and there are hypotheses which may be put to the test of facts and of experience, which make a beginning of such a science of ethics. Ethics would become the focussing point for our knowledge of human needs, and for our human, social resources which are at hand to supply those needs. It would still remain, what in part it has always been, a survey and an estimate of human values, of what men want, of what human nature demands. I see no theoretically insuperable difficulty in reaching a scientific knowledge of what the needs of human nature really are. In this part of its enquiry ethics would be comparable, say, to dietetics, which aims to discover the amount and kinds of food that the body requires under varying circumstances. Dietetics, indeed, as a science, pays little enough attention to what individuals happen to like and dislike, to the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of taste. It offers a descriptive survey of objective structures and functions. Ethics has, in large measure, been content to take into its reckoning only subjective ideals and aspirations, divorced from any objective knowledge of needs and of functions. Traditional ethics may be compared with a pre-scientific dietetics which should consult the purely subjective tastes, gastronomic norms and ideals of individuals,

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