VI.—PHENOMENALISM IN ETHICS

F. C. DOAN
1905 Mind  
TBB most characteristic feature of present-day metaphysics is the distinction which is being made more and more conspicuously between the " inner ' and the " outer " meanings of a given fact, its aspect as phenomenal and its aspect as noumenal. The very considerable efforts of Prof. Royce and Mr. Bradley, for example, have had at least this effect even among unbelievers :-that the latter are indebted for greater clearness of conception and truer insight into the meaning of the phenomenal. A
more » ... nce of phenomenalism in Psychology published in MIND from the pen of Mr. Bradley has inspired largely the thought of this following article. In general our thesis will be : that the outer meaning of an act, even in the cautious thought of Prof. Royce, and much less in the confessedly unknowable sense of Mr. Bradley-the outer meaning of an act is never operative in producing that act. The meaning of the act as a present event with its psychological flurry of associates, it is this which is the vital, telling feature of the act, and not its completed meaning as it appears when set consistently into a monistic whole. Any interpretation of an act in terms of a greater world-theory is an account of that act which either (1) refers it to a conception merely writ larger than its own simple meaning and yet of precisely the same order of fact, or else (2) falsely counts as operative that which is merely the metaphysical condition of complete thinking about the act and not the actual condition under which the act may be, and almost always is, performed. In a word, a metaphysic which proposes a completed reality has no motor quality and so is nonethical. We may define phenomenalism provisionally in the words of Mr. Bradley as "the confinement of one's attention to events with their laws of co-existence and sequence. It involves the complete abjuration of any attempt to atk in psychology for ultimate truth or oontutenoy, and it involve* the adoption
doi:10.1093/mind/xiv.2.221 fatcat:v76bs2wudnamrbtwh56tttudme