Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: cerned with certain uniformities of our experience— with the ways in which certain classes of objects (such as rocks or plants) are found to exist, or with the ways in which certain classes of events (such as the phenomena of sound or electricity) are found to occur. Such sciences have no direct reference to any end that 'is to be achieved or to any ideal by reference to which the facts are judged. The knowledge which they communicate may, indeed, be useful for certain purposes. A knowledge about rocks is useful for those who wish ,'to build houses or to sink mines. A knowledge about electricity is useful for those who wish to protect their buildings or to form telegraphic communications. But tne truth of the sciences that deal with such subjects as these is in no way affected by the ends which they may thus be made to subserve. Knowledge about thenebulte is as much a part of the science of astronomy as knowledge about the solar system, though the latter can be directly turned to account in the art of navigation, while the former has no direct practical utility. The science of Ethics, then, is distinguished from the natural sciences, inasmuch as it has a direct reference to an end that men desire to attain, or a. j type to which they wish to approximate. It is not by any means the only science, however, which has such a reference. On the contrary, there is a whole class of sciences of this character. These arc cbrrfnibnTy called the normalive sciences—/. e. the sciences that lay down rules or laws or, more strictly, that seek to define a standard or ideal with reference to which rules or laws may be formulated. Of this kind are the science of medicine (i. e. Hygienics), which deals with the nature of the distinction between health and disease, and with the rules to be observ...