Scientism and Values.pdf - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Objectivity and Social Science 27
Take any action allowed to be vicious: wilful murder, for instance.
Examine it in all lights and see if you can find that matter of fact, or
real existence, which you call vice. In whichever way you take it, you
find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is
no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as
long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn
your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation,
which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter
of fact; but 'tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself,
not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character
to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of
your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation
of it. Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compar'd to
sounds, colours, heat and cold, which, according to modern philosophy,
are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind. 5
In another passage H ume makes it clear that according to this
same modern philosophy, vice and virtue cannot consist in relations
any more than they can in qualities of objects. But if they
do not consist in either qualities or relations, the question arises
whether they exist at all. The thing that John Donne saw when
over three hundred years. ago he looked at the direction modern
science was taking and wrote:
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone
All just supply and all relation....
Sight is the noblest sense of anyone,
Yet sight hath only colour to feed on,
And colour is decaid; summer's robe growes
Duskie, and like an oft dyed garment showes.
Our blushing red, which used in cheeks· to spred
Is inward sunk, and only our soules, are red 6
the modern social scientist has not yet seen in spite of his concern
with physical science as a model of what all science should be.
The view that color and odor and sound and taste and tactile
qualities are all in the subject, none in the object, if any, that
somehow gives rise to them, is ancient. Montaigne summarizes this
view in a classic statement at the end of his famous "Apology for