Henry Waldgrave Stuart
Valuation as a Logical Process
Citation: Henry Waldgrave Stuart. "Valuation as a Logical Process".
Chapter 10 in Studies in Logical Theory edited by John Dewey. Chicago:
University of Chicago (1903): 227-340.
VALUATION AS A LOGICAL PROCESS
THE purpose of this discussion is to supply the main outlines
of a theory of value based upon analysis of the valuation-process from the
logical point of view. The general principle which we shall seek to establish
is that judgments of value, whether passed upon things or upon modes of
conduct, are essentially objective in import, and that they are reached
through a process of valuation which is essentially of the same logical
character as the judgment-process whereby conclusions of physical fact are
established—in a word, that the valuation-process, issuing in the finished
judgment of value expressive of the judging person's definitive attitude
toward the thing in question, is constructive of an order of reality in
the same sense as, in current theories of knowledge, is the judgment of
sense-perception and science. Our method of procedure to this end will be
that of assuming, and adhering to as consistently as possible, the standpoint
of the individual in the process of deliberating upon an ethical or economic
problem (for, as we shall hold, all values properly so called are either
ethical or economic), and of ascertaining, as accurately as may be, the
meaning of the deliberative or evaluating process and of the various factors
in it as these are presented in the individual's apprehension. It is in
this sense that our procedure will be logical rather than psychological.
We shall be concerned to determine the meaning of the object of
valuation as object, of the standard of value as standard, and of the valued
object as valued, in terms of the individual's own apprehension of these,
rather than to ascertain the nature and conditions of his apprehensions
of these considered as psychical events.
(228) Our attention will throughout be directed to these
factors or phases of the valuation-process in their functional aspect of
determinants of the valuing agent's practical attitude, and never, excepting
for purposes of incidental illustration and in a very general and tentative
way, as events in consciousness mediated by more "elementary" psychical
processes. The results which we shall gain by adhering to this method will
enable us to see not merely that our judgments of value are in function
and meaning objective, but also that our judgments of sense-perception and
science are, as such, capable of satisfactory interpretation only as being
incidental to the attainment and progressive reconstruction of judgments
of value.
The first three main divisions will be given over to establishing
the objectivity of content and function of judgments of value. The fourth
division will present a detailed analysis of the two types of judgment of
value, the ethical and economic, defining them and relating them to each
other, and correlating them in the manner just suggested with judgment of
the physical type. After considering, in the fifth part, certain general
objections to the positions thus stated, we shall proceed in the sixth and
concluding division to define the function of the consciousness of value
in the economy of life.[1]
I
The system of judgments which defines what one calls the objective
order of things is inevitably unique for each particular individual. No
two men can view the world from the standpoint of the same theoretical and
practical inter-
(229) -ests, nor can any two proceed in the work of gaining
for themselves knowledge of the world with precisely equal degrees of skill
and accuracy. Each must be prompted and guided, in the construction of his
knowledge of single things and of the system in which they have their being,
by his own particular interests and aims; and even when one person in a
measure shares in the interests and aims of another, the rate and manner
of procedure will not be the same for both, nor will the knowledge gained
be for both equally systematic in arrangement or in interrelation of its
parts. Each man lives in a world of his own—a world, indeed, identical in
certain fundamental respects with the worlds which his fellow-men have constructed
for themselves, but one nevertheless necessarily unique through and through
because each man is a unique individual. There is, doubtless, a "social
currency" of objects which implies a certain identity of meaning in objects
as experienced by different individuals. The existence of society presupposes,
and its evolution in turn develops and extends, a system of generally accepted
objects and relations. Nevertheless, the " socially current object" is,
as such, an abstraction just as the uniform social individual is likewise
an abstraction. The only concrete object ever actually known or in any wise
experienced by any person is the object as constructed by that person in
accordance with his own aims and purposes, and in which there is, therefore,
a large and important share of meaning which is significant to no one else.
It is needless in this discussion to dwell at length upon
the general principle of recent "functional" psychology, that practical
ends are the controlling factors in the acquisition of our knowledge of
objective things. We shall take for granted the truth of the general proposition
that cognition, in whatever sphere of science or of practical life, is essentially
teleological in the sense of being incidental always,
(230) more or less directly, to the attainment of ends.
Cognition, as the apperceptive or attentive process, is essentially the
process of scrutinizing a situation (whether theoretical or practical) with
a view to determining the availability for one's intended purpose of such
objects and conditions as the situation may present. The objects and conditions
thus determined will be made use of or ignored, counted upon as advantageous
or guarded against as unfavorable—in a word, responded to—in ways suggested
by their character as ascertained through reference to the interest in question.
In this sense, then, objective things as known by individual persons are
essentially complex stimuli whose proper function and reason for being it
is to elicit useful responses in the way of conduct-responses conducive
to the realization of ends.
From this point of view, then, the difference between one
person's knowledge of a particular object and another's signifies (1) a
difference between these persons' original purposes in setting out to gain
knowledge of the object, and (2) consequently a difference between their
present ways of acting with reference to the object. The bare object as
socially current is, at best, for each individual simply a ground upon which
subsequent construction may be made; and the subsequent construction which
each individual is prompted by his circumstances and is able to work out
in judgment first makes the object, for this individual, real and for his
purposes complete.
Now, it is our primary intention to show that objects are,
in cases of a certain important class, not yet ready to serve the person
who knows them in their proper character of stimuli, when they have been,
even exhaustively, defined in merely physical terms. It is very often not
enough that the dimensions of an object and its physical properties, even
the more recondite ones as well as those more commonly under-
(231) stood—it is often not enough for the purposes of an
agent that these characters should make up the whole sum of his knowledge
of the object in question. A measure of knowledge in terms of physical categories
is often only a beginning—the result of a preliminary stage of the entire
process of teleological determination, which must be carried through before
the object of attention can be satisfactorily known. In the present study
of the logic of valuation we shall be occupied exclusively with the discussion
of cases of this kind. In our judgments of sense-perception and physical
science we have presented to us material objects in their physical aspect.
When these latter are inadequate to suggest or warrant overt conduct, our
knowledge of them must be supplemented and reconstructed in ways presently
to be specified. It is in the outcome of judgment-processes in which this
1work of supplementing and reconstructing is carried through that the consciousness
of value, in the proper sense, arises, and these processes, then, are those
which we shall here consider under the name of "processes of valuation."
They will therefore best be approached through specification of the ways
in which our physical judgments may be inadequate.
Let us, then, assume, as has been indicated, that the process
of acquiring knowledge—that is to say, the process of judgment or attention—is
in every case of its occurrence. incidental to the attainment of an end.
We must make this assumption without attempting formally to justify it—though
in the course of our discussion it will be abundantly illustrated. Let us,
in accordance with this view, think of the typical judgment-process as proceeding,
in the main, as follows: First of all must come a sense of need or deficiency,
which may, on occasion, be preceded by a more or less violent and sudden
shock to the senses, forcibly turning one's attention to the need of immediate
action. By degrees this sense of need will grow more definite and come to
express itself in
(232) a more or less "clear and distinct" image of an end,
toward which end the agent is drawn by desire and to which he looks with
much or little of emotion. The emergence of the end into consciousness immediately
makes possible and occasions definite analysis of the situation in which
the end must be worked out. Salient features of the situation forthwith
are noticed—whether useful things or favoring conditions, or, on the other
hand, the absence of any such. Thus predicates and then subjects for many
subsidiary judgments in the comprehensive judgment-process emerge together
in action and interaction upon each other. The predicates, developed out
of the general end toward which the agent strives, afford successive points
of view for fresh analyses of the situation. The logical subjects thus discovered—objects
of attention and knowledge—require, on the other hand, as they are scrutinized
and judged, modification and re-examination of the end. The end grows clearer
and fuller of detail as the predicates or implied ("constituent") ideas
which are developed out of it are distinguished from each other and used
in making one's inventory of the objective situation. Conversely, the situation
loses its first aspect of confusion and takes on more and more the aspect
of an orderly assemblage of objects and conditions, useful, indifferent,
and adverse, by means of which the end may in greater or less measure be
attained or must, in however greatly modified a form, be defeated. Now,
in this development of the judgment-process, it must be observed, the end
must be more or less clearly and consistently conceived throughout as an
activity, if the objective means of action which have been determined in
the process are not to be, at the last, separate and unrelated data still
requiring co-ordination. If the end has been so conceived, the means will
inevitably be. known as members of a mechanical system, since the predicates
by which they have been determined have at every
(233) point involved this factor of amenability to co-ordination.
The judgment-process, if properly conducted and brought to a conclusion,
must issue at the end in the functional unity of a finished plan of conduct
with a perfected mechanical co-ordination of the available means.
We have now to see that much more may be involved in such
a process as this than has been explicitly stated in our brief analysis.
For the end itself may be a matter of deliberation, just as must be the
physical means of accomplishing it; and, again, the means may call for scrutiny
and determination from other points of view than the physical and mechanical.
The final action taken at the end may express the outcome of deliberate
ethical and economic judgment as well as of judgments in the sphere of sense-perception
and physical science. Let us consider, for example, that one's end is the
construction of a house upon a certain plot of ground. This end expresses
the felt need of a more comfortable or more reputable abode, and has so
much of general presumption in its favor. There may, however, be many reasons
for hesitation. The cost in time or money or materials on hand may tax one's
resources and injuriously curtail one's activities along other lines. And
there may be ethical reasons why the plan should not be carried out. The
house may shut off a pleasing prospect from the view of the entire neighborhood
and serve no better end than the gratification of its owner's selfish vanity.
It will cost a sum of money which might be used in paying just, though outlawed
debts.
Now, from the standpoint of such problems as these the fullest
possible preliminary knowledge of the physical and mechanical fitness of
our means must still be very abstract and general. It would be. of use in
any undertaking like the one we have supposed, but it is not sufficient
in so far as the problem is one's own problem, concrete, particular, and
so
(234) unique. One may, of course, proceed to the stage of
physical judgment without having settled the ethical problems which may
have presented themselves at the outset. The end may be entertained tentatively
as a hypothesis until certain mechanical problems have been dealt with.
But manifestly this is only postponement of the issue. The agent is still
quite unprepared, even after the means have been so far determined, to take
the first step in the execution of the plan; indeed, his uncertainty is
probably only the more harassing than before. Moreover, the economic problems
in the case are now more sharply defined, and these for the time being still
further darken counsel. Manifestly the need for deliberation is at this
point quite as urgent as the need for physical determination can ever be,
and the need is evidenced in the same way by the actual arrest and postponement
of overt conduct. The agent, despite his physical knowledge, is not yet
free to embrace the end and, having done so, use thereto the means at his
disposal. It is plainly impossible to use the physical means until one knows
in terms of Substance and Attribute or Cause and Effect, or whatever other
physical categories one may please, what manner of behavior may be expected
of them. So likewise is it as truly impossible, for one intellectually and
morally capable of appreciating problems of a more advanced and complex
sort, to exploit the physical properties thus discovered until ethical determination
of the end and economic determination of the means have been completed.[2]
There are, then, we conclude, cases in which physical determination
of the means is by itself not a sufficient prepa-
(235) -ration for conduct—in which there are ethical and
economic problems which delay the application of the physical means to the
end to which they may be physically adapted. Indeed, so much as this may
well appear as sufficiently obvious without extended illustration. Everyone
knows that it is nearly always necessary, in undertaking any work in which
material things are used as means, to count the cost; and everyone knows
likewise that not every end that is in any way attractive and within one's
reach may without more ado be taken as an object of settled desire and effort.
It is indeed needless to elaborate these commonplaces in the sense in which
they are commonly understood. However, such is not our present purpose.
Our purpose is the more specific one of showing that the meaning of Objectivity
must be widened so as to include (1) the "universe" of ends in their ethical
aspect and (2) the economic aspect of the means of action, as well as (3)
the physical aspect to which the character of Objectivity is commonly restricted.
We shall maintain that these are parts or phases of a complete conception
of Reality, and that of them, consequently, Objectivity must be predicated
for every essential reason connoted by such characterization of the world
of things "external" to the senses. It has been with this conclusion in
mind, then, that we have sought to emphasize the frequent serious inadequacy,
for practical purposes, of the merely physical determination of the means
in one's environment.
The principle thus suggested would imply that the ethical
and economic stages in the one inclusive process of reflective attention
should be regarded as involving,
(236) when they occur, the same logical function of judgment
as is operative in the sphere of sense-perception and the sciences generally.
Ethical and economic factors must on occasion be present at the final choice
and shaping of one's course of conduct, along with the physical determinations
of environing means and conditions which one has made in sense-perception.
There is, then, it would appear, at least a fair presumption, though not
indeed an a priori certainty, that these ethical and economic factors or
conditions have, like the physical, taken form in a judgmentprocess
which will admit of profitable analysis in accordance with whatever general
theory of judgment one may hold as valid elsewhere in the field of knowledge.
This presumption we shall seek to verify. Now, our interest in thus determining,
first of all, the logical character of these processes will readily be understood
from this, that, in the present view, these are the processes, and the only
ones in our experience, which are properly to be regarded as processes of
Valuation. We shall hold that Valuation, and so all consciousness of Value,
properly so called, must be either ethical or economic; that the only conscious
processes in which Values can come to definition are these processes of
ethical and economic judgment. The present theory of Value is, then, essentially
a logical one, in the sense of holding that Values are determined in and
by a logical—that is, a judgmental — valuation-process and in its details
is closely dependent upon the general conception of judgment of which the
outlines have been sketched above. Accordingly, the exposition must proceed
in the following general order: Assuming the conception of judgment which
has been presented (which our discussion will in several ways further illustrate
and so tend to confirm), we shall seek to show that the determinations made
ill ethical and economic, judgment are in the proper sense objective. This
will involve, first of all, a statement
(237) of the conditions under which the ethical and economic
judgments respectively arise—which statement will serve to distinguish the
two types of judgment from each other. We shall then proceed to the special
analysis of the ethical and economic forms from the standpoint of our general
theory of judgment, thereby establishing in detail the judgmental character
of these parts of the reflective process. This analysis will serve to introduce
our interpretation of the consciousness of Value as a factor in the conduct
and economy of life.
II
Let us then define the problem of the objective reference
of the valuational judgments by stating, as distinctly as may be, the conditions
by which ethical and economic deliberation, respectively, are prompted.
A study of these conditions will make it easier to see in what way the judgments
reached in dealing with them can be objective.
When will an end, presenting itself in consciousness in the
manner indicated in our brief analysis of the judgment-process, become the
center of attention, thereby checking the advance, through investigation
of the possible means, to final overt action? This is the general statement
of the problem of the typical ethical situation. Manifestly there will be
no ethical deliberation if the imaged end at once turns the attention toward
the environment of possible means, instead of first of all itself becoming
the object instead of the director of attention; there will be no suspension
of progress toward final action, excepting such as may later come through
difficulty in the discovery and co-ordination of the means. However, there
are cases in which the emergence of the end forthwith is followed by a check
to the reflective process, and the agent shrinks from the end presented
in imagination as being, let us say, one
(238) forbidden by authority or one repugnant to his own
established standards. The end may in such a case disappear at once; very
often it will insistently remain. On this latter supposition, the simplest
possibility will be the development of a mere mechanical tension, a "pull
and haul" between the end, or properly the impulses which it represents,
and the agent's habit of suppressing impulses of the class to which the
present one is, perhaps intuitively, recognized as belonging. The case is
the common one of " temptation " on the one side and "principle" or "conscience"
on the other, and so long as the two forces remain thus in hard-and-fast
opposition to each other there can be no ethical deliberation or judgment
in a proper sense. The standard or habit may gain the day by sheer mechanical
excess of power, or the new impulse, the temptation, may prevail because
its onset can break down the mechanical resistance.
Out of such a situation as this, however, genuine ethical
deliberation may arise on condition that standard and "temptation" can lose
something of their abstractness and their hard-and-fast opposition, and
develop into terms of concrete meaning. The agent may come to see that the
end is in some definite way of really vital interest and too important to
be put aside without consideration. He may, of course, in this fall into
gross self-sophistication, like the drunkard in the classical instance who
takes another glass to test his self-control and thereby gain assurance,
or he may act with wisdom and with full sincerity, like Dorothea Casaubon
when she renounced the impossible task imposed by her departed husband.
In the moral life one can ask or hope for complete exemption from the risk
of self-deception with as little reason as in scientific research. But however
this may be, our present interest is in the method, not in particular results
of ethical reflection. Whether properly so in a particular case or not,
the imaged end may come to seem
(239) at least plausibly defensible on grounds of principle
which serve to sanction certain other modes of conduct to which a place
is given in the accepted scheme of life; or the end may simply press for
a relatively independent recognition on the very general ground that its
emergence represents an enlargement and new development of the personality.[3]
The end may thus cease to stand in the character of blind self-assertive
impulse, and press its claim as a positive means of future moral growth,
as bringing freedom from repressive and enfeebling restraints and as tending
to the reinforcement of other already valued modes of conduct. On the other
hand, the standard will cease to stand as mere resistance and negation,
and may discover something of its hidden meaning as a product of long experience
and slow growth, and as perhaps a vital part of the organization of one's
present life, not to be touched without grave risk.
Now, on whichever side the development may first commence,
a like development must soon follow on the other, and it is the action and
reaction of standard and prospective or problematic end upon each other
that constitutes the process of ethical deliberation or judgment. Just as
in the typical judgment-process, as sketched above, so also here predicate
and subject develop each other, when once they have given over
their first antagonism and come to the attitude of reasoning together. The
predicate explains itself that the subject or new end may be searchingly
and fairly tested; and under this scrutiny the subject develops its full
meaning as a course of conduct, thereby prompting further analysis and reinterpretation
of the standard. But this is not the place for detailed analysis of the
process;[4] here we are concerned only to define the type
of situation,
(240) and this we may now do in the following terms: The
indispensable condition of ethical judgment is the presence in the agent's
mind of at least two rival interesting ends or systems of such ends. In
the foregoing, the subject of the judgment is the new end that has arisen;
the predicate or "standard" is the symbol for the old ends or values which
in the tension of the judgment-process must be brought to more or less explicit
enumeration—and, we must add, reconstruction also. Indeed, it is important,
even at this stage of our discussion, to observe that Predicate and Standard
are not equivalent in meaning. The predicate, or predicative side, of judgment
is the imagery of control in the process, which, as we have seen, develops
with the subject side; while the term "Standard" connotes the rigid fixity
which belongs to the inhibiting concept or ideal in the stage before the
judgment-process proper can begin. The ethical judgment-process is, in a
word, just the process of reconstructing standards—as in its other and corresponding
aspect it is the process of interpreting new ends. Those who oppose measures
of social reform or new modes of conduct or belief on alleged grounds of
"immorality" instinctively feel in doing so that the change may make its
way more easily against a resistance that will candidly explain itself;
and, on the other side of the social judgment-process, the more fanatical
know how to turn to good advantage for their propaganda the bitterness or
contempt of those who represent the established order. On both sides there
are those who trust more in mechanical "pull and haul" than in the intrinsic
merits of their cause.
Thus it is by encountering some rival end or entire system
of ends, as symbolized by an ideal, that a new end emerging out of impulse
comes to stand for an agent, ac the center of a problem of conduct, and
so to occupy the center of attention. And it thereby becomes an Object,
as
(242) we shall hold, which must be more fully defined in
order that it may be valued, and accordingly be held to warrant
a determinate attitude toward itself on the agent's part. We have now to
define in the same general terms the typical economic situation.
In economic theory as in common thought it is not the contemplated
act of applying certain means to the attainment of an end regarded as desirable
that functions as the logical subject of valuation. The thing or object
valued in the economic situation is one's present wealth, whether material
or immaterial, one's services or labor-whatever one gives in exchange or
otherwise sets apart for the attainment of a desired end or, proximately,
to secure possession of the necessary and sufficient means to the attainment
of a desired end. The object of attention in the valuing process is here
not itself an end of action. In this respect the economic type of judgment
is like the physical, for in both the object to be valued is a certain means
which one is seeking to adapt to some more or less definitely imaged purpose;
or a condition of which one wishes, likewise for some special purpose, to
take advantage. The ultimate goal of all judgment is the determination of
a course of conduct looking toward an end, and our present problem may accordingly
be stated in the following terms: Under what circumstances in the judgment-process
does it become necessary to the definition and attainment of an end as yet
vague and indeterminate that the requisite means, as in part already physically
determined, should be further scrutinized in attention and determined from
the economic point of view? Or, in a word: What is the "jurisdiction" of
the economic point of view?
For ordinary judgments of sense-perception the presence in
consciousness of a single unquestioned end is the adequate occasion, as
our analysis (assuming its validity) has shown.
(242) For ethical judgment we have seen that the presence
of conflicting ends is necessary; and we shall now hold that this condition
is necessary, though not, without a certain qualification, adequate, for
the economic type as well. If an imaged end can hold its place in consciousness
without a rival, and the physical means of attaining it have been found
and co-ordinated, then the use or consumption of the means must inevitably
follow, without either ethical or economic judgment; for, to paraphrase
the saying of Professor James, nothing but an end can displace or inhibit
effort toward another end. The economic situation differs, then, from the
ethical in this, that the end or system of ends entering into competition
with the one for the time being of chief and primary interest has been brought
to consciousness through reference to those "physical" means which already
have been determined as necessary to this latter end. The conflict of ends
in the economic situation, that is to say, is not due to a direct and intrinsic
incompatibility between them. Where there manifestly is such incompatibility,
judgment will be of the ethical type—as when building the house involves
the foreclosure of a mortgage, and so, in working an injury to the holder
of the site, may do violence to one's ideal of friendship or of more special
obligation; or when an impulse to intemperate self-indulgence is met by
one's ideal of social usefulness. In cases such as these one clearly sees,
or can on reflection come to see, in what way an evil result to personal
character will follow upon the imminent misdeed, and in what way suppression
of the momentary impulse will conserve the entire approved and established
way of life. Very often, however, the conflicting ends are related in no
such mutually exclusive way. Each may be in itself permissible and compatible
with the other, and, so far as any possible ethical discrimination can determine,
there is no ground for choice between them. Thus it is only through the
fact that
(243) both ends are dependent upon a limited supply of means
that one would, for example, ever bring together and deliberately oppose
in judgment the purpose of making additions to his library and the necessity
of providing a store of fuel for the winter. Both ends in such a case are
in themselves indeed permissible in a general way, but they may very well
not both of them be economically possible, and hence, for the person in
question and in the presence of the economic conditions which confront him,
not, in the last analysis, both ethically possible. When there is a conflict
between two ends that stand in close organic relation in the sense explained
above, the problem is an ethical one; when the conflict is, in the sense
explained, one of competition between ends ethically permissible—not at
variance, either one, that is, with other ends directly—for the whole
or for a share of one's supply of means, the problem is of the economic
type.[5]
There are three typical cases in which economic judgment or
valuation of the means is necessary, and the enumeration of these will make
clear the relation between the
(244) ethical and the economic types of judgment: (1) First
may be mentioned the case in which ethical deliberation has apparently reached
its end in the formation of a plan of action which, so far as one can see,
on ethical grounds is unobjectionable. A definite "temptation" may have
been overcome, or out of a more complex situation a satisfactory ethical
compromise or readjustment may have been developed with much difficulty.
Now, there are very often cases in which such a course of action still may
not be entered on without further hesitation; for, if the plan be one requiring
for its working out the use of material means, the fact of an existing limitation
of one's supply of means must bring hitherto unthought of ends into conflict
with it. There are doubtless many situations in which one's moral choice
may be carried into practice without consideration of ways and means, as
when one forgives an injury or holds his instinctive nature under discipline
in the effort to attain an ascetic or a genuinely social ideal of character.
But more often than the moral rigorist cares to see, questions of an economic
nature must be raised after the ethical "evidence is all in "—questions
which are probably more trying to a sensitive moral nature than those more
dramatic situations in which the real perils of self-sophistication are
vastly less, and the simpler, sharper defini-
(245) -tion of the issue makes possible a less difficult,
though a more decisive and edifying, victory. (2) In the second place are
those cases in which the end that has emerged is without conspicuous moral
quality, because, although it may represent some worthy impulse, it has
not been obliged to make its way to acceptance against the resistance of
desires less worthy than itself. This is the ideal case of economic theory
in which "moral distinctions are irrelevant," and the economic man is free,
according to the myth, to perform his hedonistic calculations without thought
of moral scruple. The end ethically acceptable in itself, like the enriching
of one's library, must, when the means are limited, divert a portion of
the means from other uses, and will thus, through reference to the indispensable
means, engage in conflict with other ends quite remotely, if in the
agent's knowledge at all, related with itself. (3) Finally we reach the
limit of apparent freedom from ethical considerations in the operations
of business institutions, and perhaps especially in those of large business
corporations. Apart from the routine operations of a business which involve
no present exercise of the valuing judgment, there are constantly in such
institutions new projects which must be considered, and which commonly must
involve revaluation of the means. In this revaluation the principle of greatest
revenue is supposed to be the sole criterion, regardless of other personal
or social points of view from which confessedly the measure might be considered.
But such a supposition, however true to the facts of current business practice
it may be, we must hold to be an abstraction when viewed from the standpoint
of the social life at large, and hence no real exception to our general
principle. The economic and the ethical situations differ, as types, only
in the closeness of relation between the ends that are in conflict and in
the manner in which the ends are first brought into conflict—not in respect
of the intrinsic nature of the
(246) ends which are involved in them.[6]
It is this difference which, as we shall see, explains why ethical valuation
must be of ends, and economic valuation, on the other hand, of means.
We have yet to see in what way valuation of the means
of action can serve to resolve a difficulty of the type which has thus been
designated as Economic. The question must be deferred until a more detailed
analysis of the economic judgment-process can be undertaken. It is enough
for our present purpose to note that the subject of valuation in this process
is the means, and to see that under the typical conditions which have been
described some further determination of the means than the merely physical
one of their factual availability for the competing ends is needed.[7]
Physically and mechanically the means are available for each one of the
ends or groups of ends in question; the pressing problem is to determine
for which one of the ends, if any, or to what compromise or readjustment
of certain of the ends or all of them, the means at hand are in an economic
sense most properly available.[8]
(247)
From this preliminary discussion of the ethical and economic
situations we must now pass to discuss the objectivity of the judgments
by which the agent meets the difficulties which such situations as these
present. We shall seek to show that these judgments are constructive of
an objective order of reality. It will be necessary in the first place to
determine the psychological conditions of the more commonly recognized experience
of Objectivity in the restricted sphere of sense-perception. There might
otherwise remain a certain antecedent presumption against the thesis which
we wish to establish even after the direct argument had been presented.'
III
Common-sense and natural science certainly tend to identify
the objectively real with the existent in space and time. The physical universe
is held to be palpably real in a way in which nothing not presented in sensuous
terms can be. To most minds doubtless it is difficult to understand why
Plato should have ascribed to the Ideas a higher degree of reality than
that possessed by the particular objects of sense-perception, and still
more difficult to understand his ascription of real existence to such Ideas
as those of Beauty, Justice, and the Good. There is a certain apparent stability
in a universe presented in "immediate" sense-perception —a universe with
which we are in constant bodily intercourse
(248) —that seems not to belong to a mere order of relations
which, if known in any sense, is not known to us through the senses. Moreover,
knowledge of the physical world is felt to possess a higher degree of certainty
than does any knowledge we can have of supposed economic or moral truth,
or of economic or moral standards. Of such knowledge one is disposed to
say, as Mr. Spencer does of metaphysics, that at the best it presupposes
a long and elaborate inferential process which, as long, is likely to be
faulty; whereas physical truth is immediate or else, when inference is involved
in it, easy to be tested by appeal to immediate facts. Physical reality
is a reality that can be seen and handled and felt as offering resistance,
and this is evidence of objectivity of a sort not to be found in other spheres
of knowledge for which the like claim is made.
The force of these impressions (and it would not be difficult
to find stronger statements in the history of scientific and ethical nominalism)
diminishes if one tries to determine in what consists that objectivity which
they uncritically assume as given in sense-perception. For one must recognize
that not all our possible modes of sense-experience are equally concerned
in the presentation of this perceived objective world. Certain sensory "quales"
are immediately referred to outward objects as belonging to them. Certain
others are, in a way, "inward," either not more definitely localized at
all or merely localized in the sense-organ which mediates them. Now, the
reason for this difference cannot lie in the content of the various sense-qualities
abstractly taken. A visual sensation, apart from the setting in which it
occurs in common experience, can be no more objective in its reference—indeed,
can have no more reference of any kind—than the least definite and instructive
organic sensation. For the degree of distinctness with which one discriminates
sense-qualities depends upon the number and
(249) importance of the interpretative associations which
it is important from time to time to "connect" with them; or, conversely,
the sense-qualities are not self-discriminating in virtue of an intrinsic
objective reference or meaning which each possesses and which drives it
apart from all the rest. Indeed, an intrinsic meaning, if a sensation could
possess one, would not only be superfluous in the development of knowledge,
but, as likely to be mistaken for the acquired or functional meaning, even
seriously confusing.[10]
Now, it must be granted that, if the "simple idea of sensation"
is without objective reference, no association with it of similarly abstract
sensations can supply the lack. A "movement" sensation, or a tactual, having
in itself no such meaning, cannot merely by being "associated" with a similarly
meaningless visual sensation endow this latter with reference to an object.
Objective reference is, in fact, not a sensuous thing ; it is not a conscious
"element," nor does it arise from any combination or fusion of such. It
is neither in the association of ideas as a constituent member, nor does
it belong to the association considered as a sequence of psychical states.
Instead, in our present view, it belongs to or arises out of the activity
through which and with reference
(250) to which associations are first of all established.
It is an aspect or kind of reference or category under which any sense-quality
or datum is apperceived when it is held apart from the stream of consciousness
in order that it may receive new meaning as a stimulus ; and a sensation
functioning in such a "state of consciousness"[11] is a
psychical phenomenon very different from the conscious element of "analytical"
psychology. The extent to which it is true that the objective world of sense-perception
is pre-eminently visual and tactual is then merely an evidence of the extent
to which the exigencies of the life-process have required finer sense-discrimination
for the sake of more refined reaction within these spheres as compared with
others. Our conclusion, then, must be that the consciousness of objectivity
is not as such sensuous, even as given in our perception of the material
world. The world, as viewed from the standpoint of a particular, practical
emergency, is an objective world, not in virtue of its having a "sensuous"
or a "material" aspect as something existent per se, but because
it is a world of stimuli in course of definition for the guidance of activity.[12]
It will be well to give further positive exposition of the meaning of the
view thus stated. To return once more to
(251) our fundamental psychological conception, knowledge
is essentially relevant to the solution of particular problems of more or
less urgency and of various kinds and figures in the solution of such problems
as the assemblage of consciously recognized symbols or stimuli by which
various actions are suggested. The object as known is therefore not the
same as the object as apprehended in other possible modes of being conscious
of it. The workman who is actually using his tool in shaping his material,
or the warrior who is actually using his weapon in the thick of combat,
is, if conscious of these objects at all (and doubtless he may be conscious
of them at such times, not conscious of them as objects—as the
one might be, for example, in adjusting the tool for a particular kind of
use, and the other in giving a keen edge to his blade. Under these latter
circumstances the tool or weapon is an object, and its observed
condition, viewed in the light of a purpose of using the object in a certain
way, is regarded as properly suggesting certain changes or improvements.
And likewise will the tool or the weapon have an objective character in
the agent's apprehension in the moment of identifying and selecting it from
among a number of others, or even in the act of reaching for it, especially
if it is inconveniently placed. But in the act of freely using one's objective
means the category of the objective plays no part in consciousness, because
at such times there is no judgment respecting the means—because there is
no sufficient occasion for the isolation of certain conscious elements from
the rest of the stream of conscious experience to be defined as stimuli
to certain needed responses. Such isolation will not normally take place
so long as the reactions suggested by the conscious contents involved in
the experience are fully adequate to the situation. Objects are not normally
held apart as such from the stream of consciousness in which they are presented
and recognized as possess-
(252) -ing qualities warranting certain modes of conduct,
excepting as it has become necessary to the attainment of the agent's purposes
to modify or reconstruct his activity.[13]
Are things, then, apprehended as objective in virtue of the
agent's attitude toward them, or is the agent's attitude in atypical case
grounded upon an antecedent determination of the objectivity of the things
in question? We must answer, in the first place, that there can be no such
antecedent determination. We may, it is true, speak of believing, on the
evidence of sight or touch, that a certain object is really present before
us. But neither sight nor touch possesses in itself, as a particular sense-quality,
any objective meaning. If touch is par excellence the sense of the objective
and the appeal to touch the test of objectivity, this can only be because
touch is the sense most closely and intimately connected in our experience
with action. After any interval of hesitation and judgment, action begins
with contact with and manipulation of the physical means which have been
under investigation. Not only is touch the proximate stimulus and guide
to manipulation, but all relevant knowledge which has been gained in any
judgment-process, through the other senses, and especially through sight,
must ultimately be reducible to terms of touch or other contact sense. The
alleged tactual evidence of objectivity is, then, rather a confirmation
than a difficulty for our present view. In short, we must dismiss as impossible
the hypothesis that there can be a consciousness of objectivity which is
not dependent upon and an expression of primary antecedent tendencies toward
motor response to the presented stimulus. It is our attitude toward the
prospective stimulus that mediates the consciousness of an object standing
over against us.
So far, indeed, is it from being true that objectivity is
a
(253) matter for special determination antecedently to action
that by common testimony the conviction of objectivity comes to us quite
irresistibly. The object forces itself upon us, as we say, and "whether
we will or no" we must recognize its presence there before us and its independence
of any choice of ours or of our knowledge. In the cautious manipulation
of an instrument, in the laborious shaping of some refractory material,
in the performance of any delicate or difficult task, one's sense of the
objectivity of the thing with which one works is as obtrusive as remorse
or grief, and as little to be shaken off. We shall revert to this suggested
analogy at a later stage in our discussion.
We are now in a position to define more precisely the nature of the conditions
in which the sense of objectivity emerges, and this will bring us to the
point at which the objective import of our economic and ethical judgments
can profitably be discussed. We have said that the world of the physical
is objective, not in virtue of the sensuous terms in which it is presented,
but because it is a world of stimuli for the guidance of human conduct.
Under what circumstances, then, are we conscious of stimuli in their capacity
of guides or incentives or grounds of conduct ? And the answer must be that
stimuli are interpreted as such, and so take on the character of objectivity,
when their precise character as stimuli is still in doubt, and they must
therefore receive further definition.
For example, a man pursued by a wild beast must find some
means of escape or defense, and, seeing a tree which he may climb or a stone
which he may hurl, will inspect these as well as may be with reference to
their fitness for the intended purpose. It is at just such moments as these,
then, that physical things become things for knowledge and take on their
stubbornly objective character that is to say, when they are essentially
problematic. Now, in order that
(254) any physical thing may be thus problematic and so
possess objective character for knowledge, it must (1) be in part understood,
and so prompt certain more or less indiscriminate responses; and (2) be
in part as yet not understoodin such wise that, while there are certain
indefinite or unmeasured tendencies on the agent's part to respond to the
object—climb the tree or hurl the stone—there is also a certain failure
of complete unity in the co-ordination of these activities, a certain contradiction
between different suggestions of conduct which different observed qualities
of the tree or stone may give, and so hesitation and arrest of final action.
The pursued man views the tree suspiciously before trusting himself to its
doubtful strength, or weighs well the stone and tests its rough edges before
pausing to throw it. Thus, to state the matter negatively, there are two
possible situations in which the sense of objectivity, if it emerge into
consciousness at all, cannot long continue. An object—as, for example, some
strange shrub or flower—which, in the case we are supposing, may attract
the pursued wayfarer's notice, may awaken no responses relevant to the emergency
in which the agent finds himself; and it will therefore forthwith lapse
from consciousness. Or, on the other hand, the object, as the tree or stone,
may rightly or wrongly seem to the agent so completely satisfactory, or,
rather, in effect may be so, as instantly to prompt the action
which otherwise would come, if at all, only after a period of more or less
prolonged attention. In neither of these cases, then, is there a problematic
object. In the one the thing in question is wholly apart from any present
interest, and therefore lapses. In the other case the thing seen is comprehended
on the instant with reference to its general use and merges immediately
into the main stream of the agent's consciousness without having been an
object of express attention. In neither case, therefore, is there hesitation
(255) with reference to the thing in question—any conflict
between inconsiderate positive responses prompted by certain features of
the object and inhibitions due to recognition of its shortcomings. In a
word, in neither case is there any judgment or possibility of judgment,
and hence no sense of objectivity. We can have consciousness of an object,
in the strict sense of the term, only when some part or general aspect of
the total situation confronting an agent excites or seems to warrant responses
which must be held in check for further determination. In terms of consciousness,
an object is always an object of attention—that is, an object which is under
process of development and reconstruction with reference to an end.
An inhibited impulse to react in a more or less definite way
to a stimulus is, then, the adequate condition of the emergence in consciousness
of the sense of objectivity. So long as an activity is proceeding without
check or interruption, and no conflict develops between motor responses
prompted by different parts or aspects of the situation, the agent's consciousness
will not present the distinction of Objective and Subjective. The mode of
being conscious'' which accompanies free and harmonious activity of this
sort may be exemplified by such experiences as aesthetic appreciation, sensuous
enjoyment, acquiescent absorption in pleasurable emotion, or even intellectual
processes of the mechanical sort, such as easy computation or the solution
of simple algebraic problems—processes in which no more serious difficulty
is encountered than suffices to stimulate a moderate degree of interest.
If, however, reverting to the illustration, our present need for a stone
calls for some property which the stone we have seized appears to lack,
consciousness must pass over into [lie reflective or attentive phase. The
stone will now figure as an object possessing certain qualities
which render it in a general way relevant to the emergency before
(256) us. A needed quality is missing, and this defect must
hold in check all the imminent responses until discovery of the missing
quality can set them free. In a word, the stone as known to us has assumed
the station of subject in a judgment-process, and our effort is, if possible,
to assign to it a new predicate relevant to our present situation. Psychologically
speaking, the stone is an object, a stimulus to which we are endeavoring
to find warrant for responding in some new or reconstructed way.
In this process we must assume, then, first of all, an interest
on the agent's part in the situation as a whole, which in the first place,
in terms of the illustration, makes the pursued one note the tree or stone—which
might otherwise have escaped his notice as completely as any passing cloud
or falling leaf —and suggests what particular qualities or adaptabilities
should be looked for in it. Given this interest in "making something" out
of the total situation as explaining the recognition of the stone and the
impulse to seize and hurl it, we find the sense of the stone's objectivity
emerging just in the arrest of the undiscriminating impulse. The stone must
have a certain meaning as a stimulus first of all, but it must be a meaning
not yet quite defined and certain of acceptance. The stone will be an object
only if, and so long as, the undiscriminating impulses suggested by
these elements of meaning are held in check in order that they may be ordered,
supplemented, or made more definite. It is, then, the essence of the present
contention that physical things are objective in our experience
in virtue of their recognized inadequacy as means or incentives of action—an
inadequacy which, in turn, is felt as such in so far as we are seeking to
use them as means or grounds of conduct, or to avail ourselves of them as
conditions, in coping with the general situation from which our attention
has abstracted them.
(257)
From this analysis of the conditions of the consciousness
of objectivity we must now proceed to inquire whether in the typical ethical
and economic situations, as they have been described, essentially these
same conditions are present.
In the ethical situation, according to our statement, the
subject of the judgment (the object of attention) is the new end which has
just been presented in imagination, and we L. have now to see that the agent's
attitude toward this end is for our present purpose essentially the same
as toward a physical object which is under scrutiny. For just as the physical
object is such for consciousness because it is partly relevant (whether
in the way of furthering or of hindering_ to the agent's purpose, but as
yet partly not understood from this point of view, so the imaged end may
likewise be ambiguous. The agent's moral purpose may be the (very likely
mythical) primitive one of which we read in "associational" discussions
of the moral consciousness—that of avoiding punishment. It may be that of
"imitative," sympathetic obedience to authority—a sentiment whose fundamental
importance for ethical psychology has long remained without due recognition.[14]
It may be loyalty to an ideal of conscience, or yet again a purpose of enlargement
and development of personality. But on either supposition the compatibility
of the end with the prevailing standard or principle of decision may be
a matter of doubt and so call for judgment. The problem will, of course,
be a problem in the full logical sense as involving judgment of the type
described in our discussion of the ethical situation only when the attitudes
of obedience to authority and to fixed ideals have been outgrown; but, on
the other hand, as might be shown, it is just the inevitable increasing
use of judgment with reference to these formulations of the moral life which
gradually
(258) undermines them and, by a kind of "internal dialectic"
of the moral consciousness, brings the agent to recognition as well as to
more perfect practice of a logical or deliberative method.
The end, then, is, in the typical ethical situation, an object
which one must determine by analysis and reconstruction as a means
or condition of moral "integrity" and progress. It is, accordingly, in the
second place, an object upon whose determination a definite activity of
the agent is regarded by him as depending. Just as in the physical judgment-process
the object is set off over against the self and regarded as a given thing
which, when once completely defined, will prompt certain movements of the
body, so here the contemplated act is an object which, when fully defined
in all its relevant psychological and sociological bearings, will prompt
a definite act of rejection or acceptance by the self. Now, it might be
shown, as we believe, that the complete psychological and sociological definition
of the course of conduct is in truth the full explanation of the choice;
there is no separate reaction of the moral self to which the course
of conduct is, as defined, an external stimulus. So also in the sphere of
physical judgment complete definition passes over into action—or the appreciative
mode of consciousness which accompanies action—without breach of continuity.
But within the judgment-process in all its forms there is in the agent's
apprehension this characteristic feature of apparent separation between
the subject as an objective thing presently to be known and used or responded
to, and the predicate as a response yet to be perfected in details, but
at the right time, when one has proper warrant, to be set free. It is not
our purpose here to speak of metaphysical interpretations or misinterpretations
of this functional distinction; but only to argue from the presence of the
distinction in the ethical type of judgment as in the physical as
(259) genuine an objectivity for the ethical type as can
be ascribed to the other. The ethical judgment is objective in the sense
that in it an object—an imaged mode of conduct taken as such—is presented
for development to a degree of adequacy at which one can accept it or reject
it as a mode of conduct. The ethical predicates Right and Wrong, Good and
Bad, each pair representing a particular standpoint, as we shall later see,
signify this accepting or rejecting movement of the self, this "act of will,"
of which, as an act in due time to be performed, the agent is more or less
acutely conscious in the course of moral judgment.
In the economic situation also, as above described, there
is present the requisite condition of the consciousness of objectivity.
Here, as in the ethical situation, an object is presented which one must
redetermine, and toward which one must presently act in a way likewise to
be determined in detail in judgment. We shall defer until a later stage
discussion of the reason why this subject of the economic judgment is the
means in the activity that is in progress. We are not yet ready
to show that the means must be the center of attention under the
conditions which have been specified. Here we need only note the fact of
common experience that economic judgment does center upon the means, and
show that in this fact is given the objective status of the means in the
judgment-process; for the economic problem is essentially that of withdrawing
a portion, a 11 marginal increment," of the means from some use or set of
uses to which they are at present set apart, and applying it to the new
end that has come to seem, on ethical grounds at least, desirable; and we
may regard this diversion as the essentially economic act which, in the
agent's apprehension during judgment, is contingent upon the determination
of the means. The object as economic is accordingly the means, or a marginal
portion of the means, which is to be thus diverted (or, so to speak,
(260) exposed to the likelihood of such diversion), and
its determination must be of such a nature as to show the economic urgency,
or at least the permissibility, of this diversion. Into this determination,
manifestly, the results of much auxiliary inquiry into physical properties
of the means must enter—such properties, for example, as have to do with
its technological fitness for its present use as compared with possible
substitutes, and its adaptability for the new use proposed. Taking the word
in the broad sense of object of thought, it is always an object
in space and time to which the economic judgment assigns an economic value;
and it is true here (just the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of
the psychological and sociological determinations necessary to the fixation
of ethical value) that the economically motivated physical determination
of the objective means from the standpoint of the emergency in hand is the
full " causal " explanation of the economic act. It must, however, be carefully
observed that this physical determination is in the typical case altogether
incidental, from the agent's standpoint, to the assignment of an economic
character or value to the means— a value which will at the close of the
judgment come to conscious recognition. As we shall see, the process is
directed throughout by reference to economic principles and standards, and
what shall be an adequate determination in the case depends upon the precision
with which these are formulated and the strenuousness with which they are
applied. In a word, the economic judgment assigns to the physical object,
as known at the outset, a new nonphysical character. Throughout the judgment-process
this character is gaining in distinctness, and at the end it is accepted
as the Value of the means, as warrant for the diversion of them to the new
use which has been decided on.[15]
(261)
We have now to consider whether in the actual ethical and
economic experience of men there is any direct evidence confirming the conclusions
which our logical analysis of the respective situations would appear to
require. Can any phases of the total experience of working out a satisfactory
course of conduct in these typical emergencies be appealed to as actually
showing at least some tacit recognition that these types of judgment present
each one an order of reality or an aspect of the one reality?
In the first place, then, one must recognize that in the agent's
own apprehension a judgment of value has something more than a purely subjective
meaning. It is never offered, by one who has taken the trouble to work it
out more or less laboriously and then to express it in terms which are certainly
objective, as a mere announcement of de facto determination or
a registration of arbitrary whim and caprice. One no more means to announce
a groundless choice or a choice based upon pleasure felt in contemplation
of the imaged end than in his judgments concerning the physical universe
he means to affirm coexistences and sequences, agreements and disagreements,
of " ideas " as psychical happenings. That there is an ethical or economic
truth to which one can appeal in doubtful cases is, indeed, the tacit assumption
in all criticism of another's deliberate conduct; the contrary assumption,
that criticism is merely the opposition of one's own private prejudice or
desire to the equally private prejudice or desire of another, would render
all criticism and mutual discussion of ethical problems meaningless and
futile in the plain man's apprehension as in the:. philosopher's. For the
plain man has a spontaneous confidence in his knowledge of the material
world which makes him look askance at any alleged analysis of his sense
perceptions and scientific judgments into ` associations of ideas," and
the same confidence, or something very like it,
(262) attaches to judgments of these other types. It may
perhaps be easier (though the concession is a very doubtful one to destroy
a naïve confidence in the objectivity of moral truth than a like confidence
in scientific knowledge, but it must be remembered that the plain man's
sense of the urgency, at least of ethical problems, if not of economic,
is commonly less acute than for the physical. In the plain man's experience
serious moral problems are infrequent —problems of the true type, that is,
which cannot be disposed of as mere cases of temptation; one must have attained
a considerable capacity for sympathy and a considerable knowledge of social
relations before either the recognition of such problems or proper understanding
of their significance is possible. Moral and economic crises are not vividly
presented in sensuous imagery excepting in minds of developed intelligence,
experience, and imaginative power; and the judgments reached in coping with
them do not, as a rule, obviously call for nicely measured, calculated,
and adjusted bodily movements. The immediate act of executing an important
economic judgment may be a very commonplace performance, like the dictation
of a letter, and an ethical decision may, however great its importance for
future overt conduct, be expressed by no immediate visible movements of
the body. But this possible difference of impressiveness between physical
and other types of judgments is from our present standpoint unessential;
and indeed, after all, it cannot be denied that there are persons whose
sense of moral obligation is quite as distinct and influential, and even
sensuously vivid, as their conviction of the real existence of an external
world. To the average man it certainly is clear that, as Dr. Martineau declares,
"it is an inversion of moral truth to say . . . . that horour is higher
than appetite because we feel it so; we feel it so because it is
so. This ' is' we know to be not contingent on our apprehension, not to
arise from our
(263) constitution of faculty, but to be a reality irrespective
of us in adaptation to which our nature is constituted, and for the recognition
of which the faculty is given."[16] And the impressiveness,
to most minds, of likening the sublimity of the moral law to the visible
splendor of the starry heavens would seem to suggest that the apprehension
of moral truth is a mode of consciousness, in form at least, so far akin
to sense-perception as to be capable of illustration and even reinforcement
from that type of experience.
At this point we must revert to a suggestion which presented
itself above in another connection, but which at the time could not be further
developed. This was, in a word, that there is often a feeling of obtrusiveness
in our appreciation of the objectivity of the things before us in ordinary
sense-perception (or physical judgment which is not unlike the felt insistence
of remorse and grief.[17] This feeling is so conspicuous
a feature of the state of consciousness in physical judgment as frequently
to serve the plain man as his last and irrefragable evidence of the metaphysical
independence of the material world, and it is indeed a feature whose explanation
does throw much light upon the meaning of the consciousness of objectivity
as a factor within experience. Now, there is another common feeling — or,
as we do not scruple to call it, another emotion — which is perhaps quite
as often appealed to in this way; though, as we believe, never in quite
the same connection in any argument in which the two experiences are called
upon to do service to the same end. Material objects, we are told, are reliable
and stable as distinguished from the fleeting illusive images
of a dream—they have a "solidity" in virtue of which one can "depend upon
them," are "hard and fast" remaining faithfully where one deposits them
for future use or, if they change and disappear, doing so in accordance
with fixed
(264) laws which make the changes calculable in advance.
The material realm is the realm of "solid fact" in which one can work with
assurance that causes will infallibly produce their right and proper effects,
and to which one willingly returns from the dream-world in which his adversary,
the " idealist," would hold him spellbound. We propose now briefly to consider
these two modes of apprehension of external physical reality in the light
of the general analysis of judgment given above—from which it will appear
that they are, psychologically, emotional expressions of what have been
set forth as the essential features of the judgment-situation, whether in
its physical, ethical, or economic forms. From this we shall argue that
there should actually be in the ethical and economic spheres similar, or
essentially identical, " emotions of reality," and we shall then proceed
to verify the hypothesis by pointing to those ethical and economic experiences
which answer the description.
We have seen that the center of attention or subject in the
judgment-process is as such problematic—in the sense that there are certain
of its observed and recognized attributes which make it in some sense relevant
and useful to the purpose in hand, while yet other of its attributes (or
absences of certain attributes) suggest conflicting activities. The object
which one sees is certainly a stone and of convenient size for hurling at
the pursuing animal. The situation has been analyzed and found to demand
a missile, and this demand has led to search for and recognition of a stone.
The stone, however, may be of a color suggesting a soft and crumbling texture,
or its form may appear from a distance to be such as to make it practically
certain to miss the mark, however carefully it may be aimed and thrown.
Until these points of difficulty have been ascertained, the stone is wanting
still in certain essential determinations. So far as it has been certainly
determined, it prompts to the response directly
(265) suggested by one's general end of defense and escape,
but there are these other indications which hold this response in check
and which, if verified, will cause the stone to be let lie unused. Now,
we have, in this situation of conflict or tension between opposed incitements
given by the various discriminated characters of the object, the explanation
of the aspect of obtrusiveness, of arbitrary resistance to and independence
of one's will, which for the time being seems the unmistakable mark or coefficient
of the thing's objectivity. For it is not the object as a whole that is
obtrusive; indeed, clearly, there could be no obtrusiveness on the part
of an "object as a whole," and in such a case there could also be no judgment.
The obtrusion in the case before us is not a sense of the energy of a recalcitrant
metaphysical object put forth upon a coerced and helpless human will, but
simply a conscious interpretation of the inhibition of certain of the agent's
motor tendencies by certain others prompted by the object's "suspicious"
and as yet undetermined appearances or possible attributes. The object as
amenable to use—those of its qualities which taken by themselves are unquestionable
and clearly conducive to the agent's purpose—needs no attention for the
moment, let us say. The attention is rather upon the dubious and to all
appearance unfavorable qualities, and these for the time being make up the
sum and content of the agent's knowledge of the object. On the other hand,
the agent as an active self is identified with the end and with those modes
of response to the object which promise to contribute directly to its realization.
It is in this direction that his interest is set and he strains with all
his powers of mind to move, and it is upon the self as identified with,
and for the time being expressed in, the "effort of the agent's will" that
flip object as resistant, refusing to be misconstrued, obtrudes. One must
see the object and must acknowledge its apparent, or—in the end
(266) its ascertained, unfitness. One is "coerced." The
situation is one of conflict, and it is out of the conflict that the essentially
emotional experience of "resistance" emerges.[18] The the
more special emotions of impatience, anger, or discouragement may in a given
case not be present or may be suppressed, but the emotion of objectivity
will still remain.[19]
On the same general principles the other of our two coefficients of reality
may be explained. Let us assume that the stone in our illustration has at
last been cleared of all ambiguity in its suggestion, having been taken
as a missile, and that the man in flight now holds it ready awaiting the
most favorable moment for hurling it at his pursuer. It will hardly be maintained
that under these conditions the coefficient of the stone's reality as an
object consists in its obtrusiveness, in its resistance to or coercion of
the self. The stone is now regarded as a fixed and determinate feature of
the situation—a condition which can be counted on, whatever else may fail.
Over against other still uncertain aspects of the situation (which are now
in their turn real because resistant, coercive, and obtrusive)
stands the stone as a reassuring fact upon and about which the agent can
build up the whole plan of conduct which may, if all goes well, bring him
safely out of his predicament. The stone has, so to speak, passed over to
the " ° end " side of the situation, and although it may have to be rejected
for some other
(267) means of defense, as the definition of the situation
proceeds and the plan of action accordingly changes (as in some degree it
probably must), nevertheless for the time being the imaged activities as
stimulus to which the stone is now accepted are a fixed part of the plan
and guide in further judgment of the means still undefined. The agent can
hardly recur to the stone, when, after attending for a time to the bewildering
perplexities of the situation, he pauses once more to take an inventory
of his certain resources, without something of an emotional thrill of assurance
and encouragement. In this emotional appreciation of the " solidity" and
"dependability" of the object the second of our coefficients of reality
consists. This might be termed the Recognition, the other the Perception,
coefficient. Classifying them as emotions, because both are phenomena of
tension in activity, we should group the Perception coefficient with emotions
of the Contraction type, like grief and anger, and the Recognition coefficient
with the Expansion emotions, like joy and triumph.
Now, in the foregoing interpretation no reference has been
made to any conditions peculiar to the physical type of judgment-situation.
The ground of explanation has been the feature of arrest of activity for
the sake of reconstruction, and this, if our analyses have been correct,
is the essence of the ethical and economic situations as well as of the
physical. Can there then be found in these two spheres experiences of the
same nature and emerging under the same general conditions as our Perception
and Recognition coefficients of reality ? If so, then our case for the objective
significance and value of ethical and economic judgment is in so far strengthened.
(1) In the first place, then, the object in its economic character is problematic,
assuming a desire on the agent's part to apply it, RR means, to some new
or freshly interesting end, because it has already been, and accordingly
now is, set apart for other uses and cannot
(268) thoughtlessly be withdrawn from them. Extended illustration
is not needed to remind one that these established and hitherto unquestioned
uses will haunt the economic conscience as obtrusively and inhibit the desired
course of economic conduct with as much energy of resistance as in the other
case will any of the contrary promptings of a physical object. Moreover,
the Recognition coefficient may as easily be identified in this connection.
If one's scruples gain the day, in such a case one has at least a sense
of comforting assurance in the conservatism of his choice and its accordance
with the facts, however unreconciled in another way one may be to the deprivation
that has thus seemed to be necessary. If, however, the new end in a measure
makes good its case and the modes of expenditure which the °1 scruples"
represented have been readjusted in accordance with it, then the means,
no less than before the new interpretation had been placed upon them, will
enjoy the status of Reality in the economic sense. They will be real now,
however, not in the obtrusive way, as presenting aspects which inhibit the
leading tendency in the judgment-process, but, instead, as means having
a fixed and certain character in one's economic life, which, after the hesitation
and doubt just now superseded, one may safely count upon and will do well
to keep in view henceforth. (2) In the second place, mere mention of the
corresponding ethical experiences must suffice, since only extended illustration
from literature and life would be fully adequate: on the one hand, the "still
small voice" of Conscience or the authoritativeness of Duty, "stern daughter
of the voice of God;" and, on the other, the restful assurance with which,
from the vantage-ground of a satisfying decision, one may look back in wonder
at the possibility of so serious a temptation or in rejoicing over the now-won
freedom from a burdensome and repressive prejudice.
This must for the present serve as positive exposition of
(269) our view as to the objective significance of the valuational
types of judgment. There are certain essential points which have as yet
not been touched upon, and there are certain objections to the general view
the consideration of which will serve further to explain it; but the discussion
of these various matters will more conveniently follow the special analysis
of the valuational judgments, to which we shall now proceed.
IV
In the last analysis the ultimate motive of all reflective
thought is the progressive determination of the ends of conduct. Physical
judgment, or, in psychological terms, reflective attention to objects in
the physical world, is at every turn directed and controlled by reference
to a gradually developing purpose, so that the process may also be described
as one of bringing to fulness of definition an at first vaguely conceived
purpose through ascertainment and determination of the means at hand. The
problematic situation in which reflection takes its rise inevitably develops
in this two-sided way into consciousness of a definite end on the one side,
and of the means or conditions of attaining it on the other.
It has been shown that there may be involved in any finally
satisfactory determination of a situation an explicit reflection upon and
definition of the controlling end which is present and gives point and direction
to the physical determination. But very often such is not the case. When
a child sees a bright object at a distance and makes toward it, availing
himself more or less skilfully of such assistance as intervening articles
of furniture may afford, there is of course no consciousness on his part
of any definite purposes. us such, and this is to say that the child does
not subject his conduct to criticism from the standpoint of the value of
its ends. There is simply strong desire for the distant red ball,
(270) controlling all the child's movements for the time
being and prompting a more or less critical inspection of the intervening
territory with reference to the easiest way of crossing it. The purpose
is implicitly accepted, not explicitly determined, as a preliminary to physical
determination of the situation. If one may speak of a development of the
purpose in such a case as this, one must say that the development into details
comes through judgment of the environing conditions. To change the illustration
in order not to commit ourselves to the ascription of too developed a faculty
of judgment to the child, this is true likewise of any process of reflective
attention in the mind of an adult in which a general purpose is accepted
at the outset and is carried through to execution without reflection upon
its ethical or economic character as a purpose. The specific purpose as
executed is certainly not the same as the general purpose with which the
reflective process took its rise. It is filled out with details, or may
perhaps even be quite different in its general outlines. There has necessarily
been development and perhaps even transformation, but our contention is
that all this has been effected in and through a process of judgment in
which the conditions of action, and not the purpose itself, have been the
immediate objects of determination. Upon these the attention has been centered,
though of course the attention was directed to them by the purpose. To state
the case in logical terms, it has been only through selection and determination
of the means and conditions of action from the standpoint of predicates
suggested by the general purpose accepted at the outset that this purpose
itself had been rendered definite and practical and possible of execution.
Probably such cases are seldom to be found in the adult experience. As a
rule, the course of physical or technological judgment will almost always
bring to light implications involved in the accepted purpose which must
(271) inevitably raise ethical and economic questions; and
the resolution of these latter will in turn afford new points of view for
further physical determination of the situation. In such processes the logical
points of the problem of ethical and economic valuation come clearly into
view.
In our earlier account of the matter it was more convenient
to use language which implied that ethical and economic judgment must be
preceded by implicit or explicit acceptance of a definite situation presented
in senseperception, and that these evaluating judgments could be carried
through to their goal only upon the basis of such an inventory of fixed
conditions. Thus the ultimate ethical quality of the general purpose of
building a house would seem to depend upon the precise form which this purpose
comes to assume after the actual presence and the quality of the means of
building have been ascertained and the economic bearings of the proposed
expenditure have been considered. Surely it is a waste of effort to debate
with oneself upon the ethical rightness of a project which is physically
impossible or else out of the question from the economic point of view.
We are, however, now in a position to see that this way of looking at the
matter is both inaccurate and self-contradictory. In the actual development
of our purposes there is no such orderly and inflexible arrangement of stages;
and if it is a waste of effort to deliberate upon a purpose that is physically
impossible, it may, with still greater force, be argued that we cannot find,
and judge the fitness of, the necessary physical means until we know what,
precisely, it is that we wish to do. The truth is that there is constant
interplay and interaction between the various phases of the inclusive judgment-process,
or rather, more than this, that there is a complete anal thoroughgoing mutual
implication. It is indeed true that our ethical purposes cannot take form
in a vacuum apart from consideration of their physical
(272) and economic possibility, but it is also true that
our physical and economic problems are ultimately meaningless and impossible,
whether of statement or of solution, except as they are interpreted as arising
in the course of ethical conflict.
We have, then, to do, in the present division, with situations in which,
whether at the outset or from time to time during the course of the reflective
process, there is explicit conflict between ends of conduct. These situations
are the special province of the judgment of valuation. Our line of argument
may be briefly indicated in advance as follows:
1. The judgment of valuation, whether expressed in terms of
the individual experience or in terms of social evolution, is essentially
the process of the explicit and deliberate resolution of conflict between
ends. As an incidental, though nearly always indispensable, step to the
final resolution of such conflict, physical judgment, or, in general, the
judgment of fact or existence, plays its part, this part being to define
the situation in terms of the means necessary for the execution of the end
that is gradually taking form. The two modes of judgment mutually incite
and control each other, and neither could continue to any useful purpose
without this incitement and control of the other. Both modes of judgment
are objective in content and significance. At the end of the reflective
process and immediately upon the verge of execution of the end or purpose
which has taken form the result may be stated or apprehended in either of
two ways (1) directly, in terms of the end, and (2) indirectly, in terms
of the ordered system of existent means which have been discovered, determined,
and arranged. If such final survey of the result be taken by way of preparation
for action, or for whatever reason, the end will be apprehended as possessing
ethical value and the means, under conditions later to be specified, as
possessing economic value.
(273)
2. What then is the nature and source of this apprehension
of end or means as valuable? The consciousness of end or means as valuable
is an emotional consciousness expressive of the agent's practical attitude
as determined in the just completed judgment of ethical or economic valuation
and arising in consequence of the inhibition placed upon the activities
which constitute the attitude by the effort of apprehending or imaging the
valued object. Ethical and economic value are thus strictly correlative;
psychologically they are emotional incidents of apprehending in the two
respective ways just indicated the same total result of the inclusive complex
judgment-process. Finally, as the moment of action comes on, the consciousness
of the ethically valued end lapses first; then the consciousness of economic
value is lost in a purely "physical," i.e., e., technological, consciousness
of the means and their properties and interrelations in the ordered system
which has been arranged; and this finally merges into the immediate and
undifferentiated consciousness of activity as use of the means becomes sure
and unhesitating.
When we say that the ends which oppose each other in an ethical
situation (that is, a situation for the time being seen in an ethical aspect)
are related, and the ends in an economic situation are not, we by no means
wish to imply that in the one case we have in this fact of relatedness a
satisfactory solution at hand which is wanting in the other. To feel, for
example, that there is a direct and inherent relationship between a cherished
purpose of self-culture and an ideal of social service which seems now to
require the abandonment of the purpose does not mean that one yet knows
just how the two ends should be related in his life henceforth; and again,
to say that one can bee no inherent relation between a desire for books
and pictures and the need of food, excepting in so far as both ends depend
for their realization upon a limited supply of means,
(274) is not to say that the issue of the conflict is not
of ethical significance. Such a view as we here reject would amount to a
denial of the possibility of genuinely problematic ethical situations[20]
and would accord with the opinion that economic judgment as such lies apart
from the sphere of ethics and is at most subject only to occasional revision
and control in the light of ethical considerations.
By the relatedness of the ends in a situation we mean the
fact, more or less explicitly recognized by the agent, that the new, and
as yet undefined, purpose which has arisen belongs in the same system with
the end, or group of ends, which the standard inhibiting immediate action
represents. The standard inhibits action in obedience to the impulse that
has come to consciousness, and the image of the new end is, on its part,
definite and impressive enough to inhibit action in obedience to the standard.
The relatedness of the two factors is shown in a practical way by the fact
that, in the first instance at least, they are tacitly expected to work
out their own adjustment. By the process already described in outline, subject
and predicate begin to develop and thereby to approach each other, and a
provisional or partial solution of the problem may thus be reached without
resort to any other method than that of direct comparison and adjustment
of the ends involved on either side. The standard which has been called
in question has enough of congruence with the new imaged purpose to admit
of at least some progress toward a solution through this method.
We can best come to an understanding of this recognition of
the relatedness of the ends in ethical valuation by pausing to examine somewhat
carefully into the conditions involved in the acceptance or reflective acknowledgment
of a defined end of conduct as being one's own. Any new end
(275) in coming to consciousness encounters some more or
less firmly established habit represented in consciousness by a sign or
symbolic image of some sort, the habit being itself the outcome of past
judgment-process. Our present problem is the significance of the agent's
recognition of a relatedness between his new impulsive end and the end which
represents the habit, and we shall best approach its solution by considering
the various factors and conditions involved in the agent's conscious recognition
of the established end as being such.
In any determinate end there is inevitably implied a number
of groups of factual judgments in which are presented the objective conditions
under which execution of the end or purpose must take place. There is in
the first place a general view of environing conditions, physical and social,
presented in a group of judgments (1) descriptive of the means at hand,
of the topography of the region in which the purpose is to be carried out,
of climatic conditions, and the like, and (2) descriptive of the habits
of thought and feeling of the people with whom one is to deal, their prejudices,
their tastes, and their institutions. The project decided on may, let us
say, be an individual or a national enterprise, whether philanthropic or
commercial, which is to be launched in a distant country peopled by partly
civilized races. In addition to these groups of judgments upon the physical
and sociological conditions under which the work must proceed, there will
also be a more or less adequate and impartial knowledge of one's own physical
and mental fitness for the enterprise, since the work as projected may promise
to tax one's physical powers severely and to require, for its successful
conduct, large measure of industry, devotion, patience, and wisdom. Indeed
tiny determinate Purpose whatever inevitably implies a more or less varied
and comprehensive inventory of conditions. Further illustration is not necessary
for our present purpose. We may say that in a general
(276) way the conditions relevant to a practical purpose
will group themselves naturally under four heads of classification, as physical,
sociological, physiological, and psychological. All four classes are objective,
though the last two embrace conditions peculiar to the agent as an individual
over against the environment to which for purposes of his present activity
he stands in a sense opposed.
Now our present interest is not so much in the enumeration and classification
of possible relevant conditions in a typical situation as in the significance
of these relevant conditions in the agent's apprehension of them. Perhaps
this significance cannot better be described than by saying that essentially
and impressively the conditions are apprehended as, taken together, warranting
the purpose that has been determined. We appeal, in support of this
account of the matter, to an impartial introspection of the way in which
the means and conditions of action stand related to the formed purpose in
the moment of survey of a situation. The various details presented in the
survey of a situation are apprehended, not as bare facts such as one might
find set down in a scientist's notebook, but as warranting—as closely, uniquely,
and vitally relevant to—the action that is about to be taken. This, as we
believe, is a fair account of the situation in even the commoner and simpler
emergencies that confront the ordinary man. Quite conspicuously is it true
of cases in which the purpose is a purely technological one that has been
worked out with considerable difficulty and is therefore not executed until
after a somewhat careful survey of conditions has been taken. It is often
true likewise in cases of express ethical judgment; if the ethical phases
of the reflective process have not been excessively long and difficult,
our definite sense of the ethical value of the act we are about to do lapses
quite easily, and the factual aspects and features of the situation as given
in one or more of the
(277) four classes which we have distinguished take on an
access of significance in their character of warranting, confirming, or
even compelling the act determined upon. Of our ordinary sense-perception
in the moments of its actual functioning no less than of conscience in its
aspect of a moral perceptive faculty are the words of Bishop Butler sensibly
true that " to preside and govern, from the very economy and constitution
of man, belongs to it."[21] Even in cases of more serious
moral difficulty this sanctioning aspect of the means and conditions of
action is not overshadowed. If the situation is one in which by reason of
their complexity these play a conspicuous role and must be surveyed, by
way of preparation on the agents' part, for performance of the act, they
inevitably assume, for the agent, their proper functional character. In
general, the conditions presented in the system of factual judgments have
a certain "rightful authority" which they seem to lend to the purpose or
end with reference to which they were worked out to their present degree
of factual detail. The conditions can thus seem to sanction the end because
conditions and end have been worked out together. Gradual development on
the one side prompts analytical inquiry upon the other and is in turn directed
and advanced by the results of this inquiry. In the end the result may be
read off either in terms of end or in terms of conditions and means.[22]
The two readings must be in accord and the agent's apprehension of the conditions
as warrant for the end is expression in consciousness of this "agreement."[23]
Now in this mode of apprehension of factual conditions there is a highly
important logical implication—an implica-
(278) -tion which inevitably comes more and more clearly
into view with the continued exercise of judgment, even though the agent's
habit of interest in the scrutiny of perplexing situations may still remain,
by reason of the want of trained capacity for a broader view, limited in
its range quite strictly to the physical sphere. This implication is, we
shall declare at once, that of an endeavoring, striving, active principle
or self which can be helped or hindered in its unfolding by particular purposes
and sets of corresponding conditionscan lose or gain, through devotion to
particular purposes, in the breadth, fulness, and energy of its life. The
agent's apprehension of and reference to this active principle of course
varies in all degrees of explicitness, according to circumstances, from
the vague awareness that is present in a simple case of physical judgment
to the clear recognition and endeavor at definition that are characteristic
of serious ethical crises.
That the situation should develop and bring to light this
factor is what should be expected on general grounds of logic—for to say
that a set of conditions warrants or sanctions or confirms a given purpose
implies that our purposes can stand in need of warrant, and this would seem
to be impossible apart from reference to a process whose maintenance and
development in and through our purposes are assumed as being as a matter
of course desirable. It is of the essence of our contention that the apprehension
of the conditions of action as warranting the end is a primordial
and necessary feature of the situation—indeed, its constitutive feature.
If our concern were with the psychological development of self-consciousness
as a phase of reflective experience, we should endeavor to show that this
development is mediated in the first instance by the "subjective" phenomena
of feeling, emotion, and desire; which find their place in the course
of the judgment-process. We should then hold that, with the conclusion
of the judg-
(279) -ment-process and the accompanying sense of the known
conditions as reassuring and confirmatory of the end, comes the earliest
possibility of a discriminative recognition of the self as having been all
along a necessary factor in the process. We should hold that outside of
the process of reflective attention there can be no psychical or
" elementary" beginnings of self-consciousness, and then that,
except as a development out of the experience to which we have referred
as marking the conclusion of the attentive process, there can be
no recognized specific and in any degree definable consciousness of self.
All this, however, lies rather beside our present purpose. We wish simply
to insist that it is out of the apprehension of conditions as reassuring
and confirmatory, out of this "primordial germ," that the agent's definite
recognition of himself as a center of development and expenditure of energy
takes its rise. Here are the beginnings of the possibility of self-conscious
ethical and economic valuation.
This apprehension of the means as warranting is,
we have held, a fact even when the means surveyed are wholly of the physical
sort, and we have thereby implied that consciousness of the self as "energetic"
may take its rise in situations of this type or during the physical stage
in the development of a more complex total situation. It would be an interesting
speculation to consider to what extent and in what way the development of
the sciences of sociology and physiology may have been essentially facilitated
by the emergence of this form of self-consciousness. But however the case
may stand with these sciences or with the rise of real interest in them
in the mind of a given individual, interest in the objective psychological
conditions of a contemplated act is certainly very closely dependent upon
interest in that subjective self which one has learned to know through the
past exercise of judgment in definition and contemplation of conditions
of
(280) the three other kinds. The more diversified and complex
the array of physical and social conditions with reference to which one
is to act, the more important becomes not simply a clearly articulated knowledge
of these, but also a knowledge of oneself. The self that is warranted in
its purpose by the surveyed conditions must hold itself in a steady and
consistent attitude during the performance on pain of "falling short of
its opportunity" and thereby rendering nugatory the reflective process in
which the purpose was worked out. Experience abundantly shows how easily
the assurance that comes with the survey of conditions may come to grief,
though there may have been on the side of the conditions, so far as defined,
no visible change; and in so far as self-consciousness has already emerged
as a distinguishable factor in such situations, failures of the sort we
here refer to are the more easily identified and interpreted. Some sudden
impulse may have broken in upon the execution of the chosen purpose; there
may have been an unexpected shift of interest away from that general phase
of life which the purpose represented; or in any one of a number of other
ways may have come about a wavering and a slackening in the resolution which
marked the commencement of action. The "energetic" self forthwith (if we
may so express it) recognizes that the sanction which the conditions so
far as then known gave to its purpose was a misleading because an incomplete
one, and it proceeds to develop within itself a new range of objective fact
in which may be worked out the explanation, and thereby a method of control,
of these new disturbing phenomena. The qualities of patience under disappointment,
courage in encountering resistance, steadiness and self-control in sustained
and difficult effort—these qualities and others of like nature come to be
discriminated from each other by introspective analysis and may be as accurately
measured, and in general as objectively studied, as any of the conditions
to a
(281) saving knowledge and respect of which one may already
have attained, and these newly determined psychological conditions will
henceforth play the same part in affording sanction to one's purposes as
do the rest. An ordered system of psychological categories or points of
view comes to be developed, and an accurate statement of conditions of personal
disposition and capacity relevant to each emergency as it arises will hereafter
be worked out—over against and in tension with one's gradually forming purposes
in like manner as are statements of all the other relevant objective aspects
of the situation.[24]
In the "energetic" self, we shall now seek to show, we have
the common and essential principle of both ethical and economic valuation
which marks these off from other and subordinate types of judgment. Let
us determine as definitely as possible the nature and function of this principle.
The recognition of the chosen purpose as one favorable or
otherwise to the self, and so the recognition of the self as capable of
furtherance or retardation by its chosen purposes, is not always a feature
of the state of mind which may ensue upon completed judgment. In the commoner
situations of the everyday life of normal persons, as practically always
in the lives of persons of relatively undeveloped reflective powers, it
is quite wanting as a separate distinguished phase of the experience. In
such cases it is present, if present at all, merely as the vaguely felt
implicit meaning of the recognition that the known conditions sanction and
confirm the
(282) purpose. Such situations yield easily to attack and
threaten none of those dangers, none of those possible occasions for regret
or remorse, of which complex situations make the person of developed reflective
capacity and long experience so keenly apprehensive. They are disposed of
with comparatively little of conscious reconstruction on either the subject
or the predicate side, and when a conclusion has been reached the agent's
recognition of the conditions carries with it the comfortable though too
often delusive assurance of the complete and perfect eligibility of the
purpose. If the question of eligibility is raised at all, the answer is
given on the tacit principle that "whatever purpose is, is right." To the
"plain man," and to all of us on certain sides of our lives, every purpose
for which the requisite means and factual conditions are found to be at
hand is, just as our purpose, therefore right.
The same experience of failure and disappointment which proves
our purpose to have been, from the standpoint of enlargement and enrichment
of the self, a mistaken one brings a clearer consciousness of the logic
implicit in our first confident belief in the purpose, and at the same time
emphasizes the need of making this logic explicit. The purpose, as warranted
to us by the conditions and assembled means that lay before us, was our
own, and as our own was implicitly a purpose of furtherance of
the self. The disappointment that has come brings this implication more
clearly into view, and likewise the need of methodical procedure, not as
before in the determination of conditions, but in the determination
of purposes as such; for the essence of the situation is that the execution
of the purpose has brought to light some unforeseen consequence now
recognized as having been all the while in the nature of things involved
in the purpose. This consequence or group of consequences consists (in general
terms) in the abatement or arrest of desirable modes of activity which find
their motivation elsewhere
(283) in the agent's system of accepted ends, and it is
registered in consciousness in that sense of restriction or repression from
without which is a notable phase of all emotional experience, particularly
in its early stages. The consequences are as undesirable as they are unexpected,
and the reaction against them, at first emotional, presently passes over
into the form of a reflective interpretation of the situation to the effect
that the self has suffered a loss by reason of its thoughtless haste in
identifying itself with so unsafe a purpose.[25]
It is the essential logical function of the consciousness
of self to stimulate the valuation processes which take their rise in the
stage of reflective thought thus attained. The consciousness of self is
a peculiarly baffling theme for discussion from whatever point of view,
because one finds its meaning shifting constantly between the two extremes
of a subjectivity to which "all objects of all thought" are external and
an objective thing or system of energies which is known just as other things
are—known in a sense by itself, to be sure, but known nevertheless,
and thought of as an object standing in possible relations to other
objects. Now, it is of the subjective self that we are speaking when we
say that its essential function is the stimulation or incitement of the
valuation processes, but manifestly in order to serve thus it must nevertheless
be presented in some sort of sensuous imagery. The subjective self may,
in fact, be thought of in many ways—presented in many different sorts of
imagery—but in all its forms it must be distinguished carefully from
(283) that objective self which, as described in psychology,
is the assemblage of conditions under which the subjective or "energetic"
self works out its purposes. It may be the pale, attenuated double of the
body, or a personal being standing in need of deliverance from sin, or an
atom of soul-substance, or, in our present terminology, a center of developing
and unfolding energy. The significant fact is that, however different in
content and in motive these various presentations of the subjective self
may be, they are, one and all, as presentations and as in so far objective,
stimuli to some definite response. The savage warrior deposits his double
in a tree or stone for safety while he goes into battle; the self that is
to be saved from sin is a self that prompts certain acceptable acts in satisfaction
of the quasi-legal obligations that the fact of sin has laid upon the agent.
The presented self, whatever the form it may assume as presentation, has
its function, and this function is in general that of stimulus to the conservation
and increase, in some sense, of the self that is not presented, but for
whom the presentation is. Now our own present description of the self as
"energetic," as a center or source of developing and unfolding energy is
in its way a presentation. It consists of sensuous imagery and suggests
a mechanical process, or the growth of a plant perhaps, which if properly
safeguarded will go on satisfactorily— a process which one must not allow
to be perturbed or hindered by external resistance or internal friction
or to run down. To many persons doubtless such an account would seem arbitrary
and fantastic in the extreme, but no great importance need be attached to
its details. The kind and number and sensuous vividness of the details in
which this essential content of presentation may be clothed must of course
depend, for each person, upon his psychical idiosyncrasy.
Indeed, as the habit of reflection upon purposes comes
(285) to be more firmly fixed, and the procedure of valuation
to be consciously methodical and orderly, the sensuous content of the presented
self must grow constantly more and more attenuated until it has declined
into a mere unexpressed principle or maxim or tacit presumption, prescribing
the free and impartial application of the method of valuation to particular
practical emergencies as these arise. For a self, consisting of presented
content of whatever sort, which one seeks to further through attentive deliberation
upon concrete purposes, must, just in so far as it has content, determine
the outcome of ethical judgment in definite ways. Thus the soul that must
be saved from sin (if this be the content of the presented self) is one
that has transgressed the law in certain ways and the right relations that
should subsist between creature and Creator, and has thereby incurred a
more or less technically definable guilt. This guilt can only be removed
and the self rehabilitated in its normal relations to the law by an appropriate
response to the situation—by a choice on the agent's part, first, of a certain
technical procedure of repentance, and then of a settled purpose of living
as the law prescribes.[26] So also our own image of the
self as "energetic" after the manner of a growing organism may well seem,
if taken too seriously as to its presentational details, to foster a bias
in favor of overconservative adherence to the established and the accredited
as such.[27]
The argument of the last few paragraphs may be restated
(286) in the following way in terms of the evolution of the
individual's moral attitude or technique of self-control:
1. In the stage of moral evolution in which custom and authority
are the controlling principles of conduct, moral judgment in the proper
sense of self-conscious, critical, and reconstructive valuation of purposes
is wanting. Such judgment as finds here a place is at best of the merely
casuistical type, looking to a determination of particular cases as falling
within the scope of fixed and definite concepts. There is no self-consciousness
except such as may be mediated by the sentiment of willing obedience. It
is, at this stage, not the particular sort of conduct which the
law prescribes that in the agent's apprehension enlarges and develops the
self; so far as any thought of enlargement and development of the self plays
a part in influencing conduct, these effects are such as, in the agent's
trusting faith, will come from an entire and willing acceptance of the law
as such. "If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine." Moreover,
the stage of custom and authority goes along with, in social evolution,
either very simple social conditions or else conditions which, though very
complex, are stable, so that in either case the conditions of conduct are
in general in harmony with the conduct which custom and authority prescribe.
The law, therefore, can be absolute and takes no account of possible inability
to obey. The divine justice punishes infraction of the law simply as objective
infraction; not as sin, in proportion to the sinner's responsibility.
2. But inevitably custom and authority come to be inadequate.
As social conditions change, custom becomes antiquated and authority blunders,
wavers, contradicts itself in the endeavor to prescribe suitable modes of
individual conduet. Obedience no longer is the way to light. The self becomes
self-conscious through feeling more and more the repression and the misdirection
of its energies that obedi-
(287) ence now involves. This is the stage of subjective
morality or conscience; and the rise of conscience, the attitude of appeal
to conscience, means the beginning of endeavor at methodical solution
of those new problematic situations in the attempt to deal with which
authority as such has palpably collapsed. We say, however, that conscience
is the beginning of this endeavor; for conscience is, in fact,
an ambiguous and essentially transitional phenomenon. On the one hand conscience
is the inner nature of a man speaking within him, and so the self furthers
its own growth in listening to this expression of itself. In this aspect
conscience is methodological. But on the other hand conscience speaks,
and, speaking, must say something determinate, however general this
something may be. In this aspect conscience is a résumé
of the generic values realized under the system of custom
and authority, but to the present continued attainment of which the particular
prescriptions of custom and authority are no longer adequate guides.
Conscience is thus at once an inward prompting to the application of logical
method to the case in hand and a body of general or specific rules under
some one of which the case can be subsumed. In ethical theory we accordingly
find no unanimity as to the nature of conscience. At the one extreme it
is the voice of God speaking in us or through us, in detailed and specific
terms—and so, virtually, custom and authority in disguise. At the other
it is an empty abstract intuition that the right is binding upon us—and,
so, simply the hypostasis of demand for a logical procedure. The history
of ethics presents us with all possible intermediate conceptions in which
these extreme motives are more or less skilfully interwoven or combined
in varying proportions. The truth is that conscience is essentially a transitional
conception, and so necessarily looks before rind after. In olle of its aspects
it is a self which has come to miss (and therefore to image
(288) for itself) the values and, it may be, a certain dawning
sense of vitality and growth which obedience to authority once afforded.[28]
In its other aspect it is a self that is looking forward in a self-reliant
way to the determination on its own account of its purposes and values.
And finally, as for the environing world of means and conditions, clearly
this is not necessarily harmonious with and amenable to conscience; indeed,
in the nature of things it can be only partially so. The morality of conscience
is, therefore, either mystical, a morality that seeks to escape the world
in the very moment of its affirmation that the world is unreal (because
worthless), or else it takes refuge in a virtual distinction between "absolute"
and "relative" morality (to borrow a terminology from a system in which
properly it should have no place), perhaps setting up as an intermediary
between heaven and earth a machinery of special dispensation.[29]
3. Conscience professes in general, that is, to be autonomous,
and the profession is, strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms. Moreover,
apart from considerations of the logic of the situation, theories of conscience
have, as a matter of fact, always lent themselves kindly to theological
purposes just as the theory of self-realization in its classic modern statement
rests upon a metaphysical doctrine of the Absolute.[30]
Inevitably the movement concealed within this essentially unstable conception
must have its legitimate outcome (1) in a clearing of the presented self
of its fixed elements of content, thus setting it free in its character
of a nonpresentational principle of valuation, and (2) a setting apart of
these elements of content from the principle of valuation
(289) as standards for reference and consultation rather
than as law to be obeyed.
We have thus correlated our account of the logic whereby the
"energetic" self comes to explicit recognition as stimulus to the valuation-process
with the three main stages in the moral evolution of the individual and
the race. We were brought to this first-mentioned part of our discussion
by our endeavor to find out the factors involved in the first acceptance
of a conscious purpose (or, indifferently, the subsequent recognition of
it as a standard)—an endeavor prompted by the need of distinguishing, with
a view to their special analysis, the two types of valuation-process. We
now return to this problem.
The following illustration will serve our present undertaking:
A lawyer or man of business is struck by the great need of honest men in
public office, or has had his attention in some impressive way called to
the fact of great inequality in the present distribution of wealth, and
to the diverse evils resulting therefrom. These facts hold his attention,
perhaps against his will, and at last suggest the thought of his making
some personal endeavor toward improvement of conditions, political or social,
as the case may be. On the other hand, however, the man has before him the
promise of a successful or even brilliant career in his chosen occupation,
and is already in the enjoyment of a substantial income, which is rapidly
increasing. Moreover, he has a family growing up about him, and he is not
simply strongly interested in the early training and development of his
children, and desirous of having himself some share in conducting it, but
he sees that the suitable higher education of his children will in a few
years make heavy demands upon his pecuniary means. Here, then, we have a
situation the analysis of which will enable us to distinguish and define
the provinces of ethical and economic judgment.
(290)
It is easy to see that we have here a conflict between ends.
On the one side is the thought of public service in some important office
or, let us say, the thought of bettering society in a more fundamental way
by joining the propaganda of some proposed social reform. This end rests
upon certain social impulses in the man's nature and appeals to him as strongly,
we may fairly assume, as would any purpose of immediate self-interest or
self-indulgence, so that it stands before him and urges him with an insistent
pertinacity that at first even puts him on his guard against it as a temptation.
Over against this concrete end or subject of moral valuation stand other
ends comprehended or symbolized in the ideals of regular and steady industry,
of material provision for family, of paternal duty toward children, of scholarly
achievement as lawyer or judge, and the like—ideals which are indeed practical
and personal, but which, as they now function, are general or universal
in character, are lacking in the concreteness and emotional quality which
belong to the new purpose which has just come to imagination and has brought
these ideals into action on the predicate side. Will this life of social
agitation really be quite "respectable," and befitting the character of
a sober and industrious man? Will it enable me to support and educate my
family? Will it permit me to devote sufficient attention to their present
care and training? And will it not so warp my nature, so narrow and concentrate
my interests, as in a measure to disqualify me for the right exercise of
paternal authority over them in years to come? Moreover, will not a life
of agitation, of constant intercourse with minds — and natures in many ways
inferior to my own and those of my present professional associates, lower
my intellectual and moral standards, and so matt, of me in the end n less
useful member of society than I am at present? These and other questions
like them present the issue in its earlier aspect.
(291)
Presently, however, the tentative purpose puts in its defense,
appealing to yet other recognized ideals or standards of selfsacrifice,
benevolence, or social justice as witnesses in its favor. The conflict thus
takes on the subject-predicate form, as has already been explained. On the
one hand we have the undefined but strongly insistent concrete purpose;
on the other hand we have a number of symbolic concepts or universals standing
for accepted and accredited habitual modes of conduct. The problem is that
of working the two sides of the situation together into a unified and harmonious
plan of conduct which shall be at once concrete and particular, as a plan
chosen by way of solution of a given present emergency, and universal, as
having due regard for past modes of conduct, and as itself worthy of consideration
in coping with future emergencies.
Now, how shall we discriminate the ethical and the economic
aspects of the situation which we have described? We shall most satisfactorily
do this through a consideration of the various sorts of conditions and means
of which account must be taken in working the situation through to a solution,
or (to express it more accurately) the various sorts of conditions and means
which need to be defined over against the purpose as the purpose gradually
develops into detailed form.
We may say, first of all, that there are psychological conditions
which must be taken into consideration in the case before us. Our thesis
is that in so far as a situation gives rise to the determination of psychological
conditions and is advanced along the way toward final solution through determination
of these, the situation is an ethical one. In other words, we hold that
the ends at issue in the situation are related" in so far as they depend
upon the same set of psychological conditions. In so far as these statements
art, not true of the situation there must be a resort to economic judgment.
By the general questions suggested above as presenting
(292) themselves to the agent we have indicated in what
way the course of action taken must have regard to certain psychological
considerations. Entering upon the new way of life will inevitably lessen
the agent's interest in his present professional pursuits and so make difficult,
and in the end even irksome, any attempt at continuing in them either as
a partial means of livelihood or as a recreation. The new work will be absorbing—as
indeed it must be if it is to be worth while. In the same way the man must
recognize that his nature is not one of the rare ones so richly endowed
in capacity for sympathy that constant familiarity with general conditions
of misery and suffering does not dull their fineness of sensibility to the
special concerns and interests of particular individuals. If he takes his
suffering fellow-men at large for his children, his own children will probably
suffer just in so far the loss of a father's special sympathy and understanding
care. And likewise he must be drawn away and isolated from his friends,
for it will be hard for him, he must foresee, to hold free and intimate
converse with men whose ways of thinking lie apart from his own controlling
interest and for whose insensibility to the things that move him so profoundly
he must come more and more to feel a certain impatience if not contempt.
Not to enlarge upon these possibilities and others of like nature, we must
see that reflection upon the situation must presently bring to consciousness
these various consequences of the kind of action which is proposed and a
recognition that the ground of relation between them and the action proposed
lies in certain qualities and limitations of his own nature. These latter
are for him the general psychological conditions of action, his "empirical
self," the general nature of which he has doubtless already come to ho familiar
with in many former situations perhaps wholly different in superficial aspect
from from the present one.
(293)
Now, just in so far as there is this relation of mutual exclusiveness
between the end proposed and certain of the standard ends or modes of conduct
which are involved, judgment will be by the direct or ethical method of
adjustment presently to be described. Let us assume accordingly that a tentative
solution of the problem has been reached to the effect that a portion of
the lawyer's time shall be given to his profession and to his family life,
and that the remainder shall be given to a moderate participation in the
social propaganda. Over against this tentative ethical solution, as its
warrant in the sense explained above, will stand in the survey of the situation
that may now be taken a certain fairly definite disposition or Anlage
of the capacities and functions of the empirical self.[31]
Now on the basis of the ethical solution thus reached there will be further
study of the situation, perhaps as a result of failure in the attempt to
carry the solution into practice, but more probably as a further preparation
for overt action. Forthwith it develops that the compromise proposed will
be impossible. Participation in the social agitation will excite hostility
on the part of the classes from which possible clients would come and will
cause distrust and a suspicion of inattention to details of business among
the lawyer's present clientage. There are, in a word, a whole assemblage
of "external" sociological conditions (and we need not stop to speak of
physical conditions which co-operate with these and contribute to their
effect which effectually veto the plan proposed. In general these external
conditions are such as to deprive the agent of the means of living in the
manner which the ethical determination of the end proposes. In the present
case, unless some other more feasible compromise can be devised, either
the one extreme or the other must be chosen—either continuance in the profession
and the corresponding general
(294) scheme of life or the social propaganda and reliance
upon such scant and precarious income as it may incidentally afford.
We can now define the economic aspect of a situation in terms
of our present illustration. The end which the lawyer had in view in a vague
and tentative way was, as we saw, defined with reference to his ethical
standards—that is to say, a certain measure of participation in the new
work was determined as satisfactory at once to his ideals of devotion to
the cause of social justice and to his sense of obligation to himself and
to his family. In this sense, logically speaking, a subject was defined
to which a system of predicates, comprehended perhaps under the general
predicate of right or good, applies. Now, however, it appears, from the
inspection of the material and social environment, that the execution of
this purpose, perfectly in accord though it may be with the spiritual capacities
and powers of the agent, is possible only on pain of certain other consequences,
certain other sacrifices, which have not hitherto been considered. That
a half-hearted interest in his profession would still not prevent his earning
a moderate income from it was never questioned in the ethical "first approximation"
to a final decision, but now the issue is fairly presented, and, as we must
see, in a very difficult and distressing way; for the essence of the situation
is that the ends now in conflict, that of earning a living and caring for
his family and that of laboring for the social good, are not intrinsically
(that is, from the standpoint of the empirical self) incompatible. On the
contrary, these two ends are psychologically quite compatible, as the outcome
of the ethical judgment shows; only the "external" conditions oppose them
to each other. The difficulty of the case lies, then, just in the fact that
the conflicting ends, both standing, as they do, for strong personal interests
of the self, nevertheless cannot be brought to an adjustment by the
(295) direct method of an apportionment between them of
the °1 spiritual resources" or "energies" of the self. Instead, the case
is one calling for an apportionment of the external means, and so, proximately,
not for immediate determination of the final end, but for economic determination
of the means.
We come now to the task of describing, so far as this may
be possible, the judgment or valuation-processes which correspond to the
types of situation thus distinguished. We are able now to see that these
must be constructive processes, in the sense that in and through them courses
of conduct adapted to unique situations are shaped by the concourse of established
standards with a new end which has arisen and put in its claim for recognition.
We can see, moreover, that these valuation-processes effect a construction
of a different order from that given in factual judgment. Factual judgment
determines external objects as means or conditions of action from standpoints
suggested by the analysis and development of ends. Judgments of valuation
determine concrete purposes from standpoints given in recognized general
purposes of the self-purposes which are general in virtue of their having
been taken by abstraction from concrete cases, in which they have received
particular formulation as purposes, and set apart as typical modes of conduct
in general serviceable to the "energetic" self.[32] Logically
factual judgment is at all times subordinate to valuational; when valuational
judgment has become consciously deliberate, this logical subordination becomes
explicit and factual judgment appears in its true character. Its essential
function is that of presenting the conditions which sanction and stimulate
our ethically and economically determined purposes.[33]
Finally, in the construction of purposes and recon-
(296) -struction of standards in valuation the ideal of
the expansion and development of the "energetic" self controls—not as a
"presented" or contentual self prescribing particular modes of conduct,
but as a principle prescribing the greatest possible openness to suggestion
and an impartial application of the method of valuation to the case in hand.
As we have said, in whatever sensuous image we figure the "energetic" self,
its essential character lies in its function of stimulating methodical valuation.
In place of the two-faced and ambiguous "presented" self, which is characteristic
of the stage of conscience, we now have in the stage of valuation the "energetic"
self on the one hand and standards on the other.[34]
We have now to consider the actual procedure of valuation, and first the
ethical form as above defined. Bearing in mind that we are not concerned
with cases of obedience to authority or deference to conscience, let us
take a case of genuine moral conflict such as we were considering some time
since. Suppose that one has the impulse to indulge in some form of amusement
which he has been in the habit of considering frivolous or absolutely wrong.
The end, as soon as imaged, or rather as the condition of its being imaged,
encounters past habits of conduct symbolized by standardsstandards which
may be presented under a variety of forms, a maxim learned in early childhood,
the ideal of a Stoic sage or Christian saint, the example of some friend,
or a precept put in abstract terms, but which, however presented, are essentially
symbolic of established habits of thought or action.[35]
Solution of such a problem proceeds, in general, along two closely interwoven
lines: (1) collation and comparison of cases recognized as conforming to
the standard,
(297) with a view to determining the standard type of conduct
in a less ambiguous way, and (2) definition of the relations between this
type of conduct and other recognized types in the catalogue of virtues.
Now, these two movements are in fact inseparable, for, without
reference to the entire system of virtues of which the one now asserting
itself is a member, the comparison of cases with a view to definition of
the virtue would be blind and hopeless of any outcome. The agent in the
case before us desires to be temperate in amusement and to make profitable
use of leisure time, but after all he may wonder whether these ideals really
require the austerities of certain mediaeval saints or the Stoic ataraxy.
The saint's feats of spiritual athletics may have served a useful purpose,
in ruder times, as evidence of human power to lead a virtuous and thoughtful
life, but can such self-denial now be required of the moral man? It is apparent,
in short, that the superficially conceived ideal must be analyzed. We must
consider the spirit" of our saint or hero, not the letter of his conduct,
as we say, and in interpreting it make due allowance for the conditions
of the time in which he lived and the grade of general intelligence of those
he sought to edify. Whether our standard is a person or a parable or an
abstractly formulated precept, the logic of the situation is the same in
every case of judgment. The analysis of a standard cannot proceed without
the "synthesis" or co-ordination of the type of conduct thereby defined
with other distinguishable recognized types of conduct into a comprehensive
ideal of life as a whole. In the last resort the implicit relations of all
the virtues will be made explicit in the process of defining accurately
any one of them.
In the last resort, then, the predicate of the ethical judgment
is the whole system of the recognized habits of the agent, and each judgment-process
is in its outcome a read-
(298) -justment of the system to accommodate the new habit
that has been seeking admission. Both the old habits and the new impulse
have been modified in the process just as the intension of a class term
and the particular "subsumed" under the class are reciprocally modified
in the ordinary judgment of sense-perception. We are once more able to see
that the process of ethical judgment or valuation is not a process of subsumption
or classification, of ascertaining the value of particular modes
of conduct, but on the contrary a process of determining or assigning
value. Each judgment process means a new and more or less thoroughgoing
redetermination of the self and hence a fixation of the ethical value of
the conduct whose emergence as a purpose gave rise to the process. The moral
experience is not essentially and in its typical emergencies a recognition
of values with a view to shaping one's course accordingly, but rather
a determining or a fixation of values which shall serve for the
time being, but be subject at all times to re-appraisal.
If the present discussion were primarily intended as a contribution
to general ethical theory, it would be a part of our purpose to show in
detail that any formulation of an ethical ideal in contentual II material"
terms must always be inadequate for practical purposes and hence theoretically
indefensible. This, as we believe, could be shown true of the popularly
current ideal of self-realization as well as of hedonism in its various
forms and the older systems of conscience or the moral sense. These all
are essentially fixed ideals admitting of more or less complete specification
in point of content and regarded as tests or canons by appeal to which the
moral quality of any concrete act can be deductively ascertained. They are
the ethical analogues of such metaphysical principles as the Cartesian God
or the Substance of Spinoza, and the logic implied in regarding them as
adequate standards for the valuation of conduct is the
(299) logic whereby the Rationalist sought to deduce from
concepts the world of particular things. The present desideratum in ethical
theory would appear to be, not further attempts at definition of a moral
ideal of any sort, but the development of a logical method for the valuation
of ideals and ends in which the results of more modern researches in the
theory of knowledge should be made use of—in which the concept of self should
play the part, not of the concept of Substance in a rationalistic metaphysics,[36]
but of such a principle as that of the conservation of energy, for example,
in scientific inference.[37]
We have, then, in each readjustment of the activities of the
self a reconstruction in knowledge of ethical reality—a reconstruction which
at the same time involves the assignment of a definite value to the new
mode of conduct which has been worked out in the readjustment. We conclude,
then, that the ethical experience is one of continuous construction and
reconstruction of an order of objective reality, within which the world
of sense-perception is comprised as the world of more or less refractory
means to the attainment of ethical purposes. In this process of construction
of ethical reality current moral standards play the same part as concepts
already defined—that is to say, the agent's present habits—
(300) do in the typical judgment of sense-perception. They
play the part of symbols suggestive of recognized and heretofore habitual
modes of action with reference to conduct of the type of the particular
instance that is under consideration, serving thus to bring to bear upon
the subject of the judgment sooner or later the entire moral self. The outcome
is a new self, and so for the future a new standard, in which the past self
as represented by the former standard and the new impulse have been brought
to mutual adjustment. Our position is that this adjustment is essentially
experimental and that in it the general principle of the unity
and expansion of the self must be presupposed, as in inductive inference
general principles of teleology, of the conservation of energy, and of organic
interconnection of parts in living things are presupposed. The unity and
increase of the self is not a test or canon, but a principle of moral experimentation.[38]
Finally, we must note one further parallel between ethical
judgment and the judgment of sense-perception and science. However the man
of science may, as a nominalist, regard the laws of nature as mere observed
uniformities of fact and particulars as the true realities, these same laws
will nevertheless on occasion have a distinctly objective character in his
actual apprehension of them. The stubbornness with which a certain material
may refuse to lend itself to a desired purpose will commonly be reinforced,
as a matter of apprehension, by one's recognition of the "scientific necessity"
of the phenomenon. As offering resistance the thing itself, as we have seen,
becomes objective; so also does the law of which this case may be recognized
as only a particular example—and the other type of objectivity experience
we need not here do more than mention as likewise possible
(301) in one's apprehension of the law as well as of the
"facts" of nature. Both types of objectivity attach to the moral law as
well. The standard that restrains is one "above" us or "beyond" us. Even
Kant, as the similitude of the starry heavens would suggest, was not incapable
of a faint "emotion of the heteronomous," and authority in one form or another
is a moral force whose objective validity as moral, both in its inhibiting
and in its sanctioning aspects, human nature is prone to acknowledge. The
apprehension of objectivity is everywhere, as we have held, emotional. One
type of situation in which the moral law takes on this character is found
in the interposition of the law to check a forward tendency; the other is
found in the instant of transition from doubt to the new adjustment that
has been reached. In the one case the law is "inexorable" in its demands.
In the other case there are two possibilities: If the adjustment has been
essentially a rejection of the new "temptation," the law which one obeys
is one no longer inexorable, but sustaining, as a rock of salvation. If
the adjustment is a distinctly new attitude, the sense of the objectivity
of the principle embodied in it will commonly be less strong, if not for
the time being almost wholly wanting; but in the moment of overt action
it will in some degree wear the character of a firm truth upon which one
has taken his stand.
This general view of the logical constitution of the moral
experience may suggest a comparison with the fundamental doctrine of the
British Intellectualist school. The Intellectualist writers were very largely
guided in their expositions by the desire of refuting on the one hand Hobbes
and on the other Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Against Hobbes they wished to
establish the obligatory character of the moral law entirely apart from
sanction or enactment by political authority. Against the Sentimentalists
they wished to vindicate its objectivity and permanence. This twofold
(302) purpose they accomplished by holding that the morality
of conduct lies in its conformity to the " objective nature of things,"
the knowledge of which, in its moral aspects, is logically deducible from
certain moral axioms, self-evident like those of mathematics. Now this mathematical
analogy is the key to the whole position of the Intellectualist writers.
By so conceiving the nature of knowledge these men seriously weakened their
strong general position. Mathematics is just that species of knowledge which
is most remote from and apparently independent of any reference to conduct,
and the Intellectualists, by choosing it as their ideal, were thereby rendered
incapable of explaining the obligatoriness of the moral law. An adequate
psychology of knowledge would have obviated this difficulty in their system.
The occasion for economic judgment is given, as we have seen,
in a conflict between ends not incompatible, in view of any ascertainable
conditions of the agent's nature as an empirical self, but inhibitory of
each other in view of what we have described as conditions external to the
agent. Thus the lawyer in our illustration found his plan of compromise
thwarted by the existence of such sociological conditions as would make
the practice of his profession, in the manner intended, impossible, and
so cut off his income. Similarly the peasant in a European country finds
that (for reasons which, more probably, he does not understand) he can no
longer earn a living in the accustomed way, and emigrates to a country in
which his capital and his physical energies may be more profitably employed.
So also in the everyday lives of all of us ends and interests quite disparate,
so far as any relation to each other through our psychical capacities is
concerned, stand very frequently in opposition, nevertheless, and Balling
for adjustment. We must make a choice between amusement or intellectual
pursuits or the means of
(303) aesthetic culture, on the one hand, and the common
necessaries of life on the other, and the difficulty of the situation lies
just in absence of any sort of "spiritual affinity" between these ends.
There is no necessary ratio between the satisfaction of the common needs
of life and the cultivation of the higher faculties—no ratio for which the
individual can ever find a sanction in the constitution of his empirical
self through the direct method of ethical valuation. The common needs must
have their measure of recognition, but no attempted ethical valuation of
them can ever come to a result convincingly warranted to the "energetic"
self by psychological conditions. The economic situation as such is in this
sense (that is, from the standpoint of any recognized ethical standards)
unintelligible. It is this ethical unintelligibility that often lends a
genuine element of tragedy to situations which press urgently and in which
the ends at issue are of great ethical moment. It is no small matter to
the emigrant, for example, that he must cut the very roots by which he has
grown to the sort of man he finds himself to be. His whole nature protests
against this violence, and questions its necessity, though the necessity
is unmistakable and it would be quite impossible for him not to act accordingly.
Nevertheless, tragic as such a conflict may well be, it does not differ
in any logically essential way, does not differ in its degree of strictly
logical difficulty, from the ethically much less serious economic problems
of our everyday life.
Now, we have already defined the economic act for which economic
judgment is preparatory as being, in general terms, the diversion of certain
means from a present use to which they have been devoted to a new use which
has come to seem in a general way desirable.[39] Thus,
iii tile cases just mentioned; the lawyer contemplates the virtual purchase
of his
(304) new career by the income which his profession might
in years to come afford him, the emigrant seeks a better market for his
labor, and the pleasure-seeker and the ambitious student and the buyer of
a commodity in the market propose to themselves, each one, the diversion
from some hitherto intended use of a sum of money. Manifestly it is immaterial
from our logical point of view whether the means in question which one proposes
to apply in some new way are in the nature of physical and mental strength,
or materials and implements of manufacture ready to be used, or means of
purchase of some sort wherewith the desired service or commodity may be
obtained at once. The economic problem, to state it technically, is the
problem of the reapplicability of the means, interpreting the category
of means quite broadly.
In a word, then, the method of procedure adapted to the economic
type of situation is that of valuation of the means, not that of direct
valuation of the ends. This method is one of valuation since, like the ethical
method, it is determinative of a purpose, but it accomplishes this result
in its own distinctive way. The problem of our present analysis will accordingly
be how this method of valuation of the means is able to help toward an adjustment
of disparate or unrelated ends which the ethical method is inadequate to
effect.
Let us assume that a vague purpose of foreign travel, for
example, has presented itself in imagination, and that the preliminary stage
of ethical judgment has been passed through, with the result that the purpose,
in a more definite form than it could have at first, is now ready for economic
consideration. In the first place the cost of the journey must be determined,
and this step, in terms of our present point of view, is simply a methodological
device whereby certain ends which the standards involved in the stage of
ethical judgment could not suggest or could not effectually take into co-operation
with themselves in their determination
(305) of the end are brought into play. Ascertaining the
means suggests these disparate ends, these established modes of use of the
means, with the result that the agent's "forward tendency" is checked. Shall
the necessary sums be spent in foreign travel or shall they be spent in
the present ways—in providing various physical necessities and comforts,
or for various forms of amusement, or in increasing investments in business
enterprises? These modes of use do not admit of ethical comparison with
the plan of foreign travel, and the agent's interest must therefore now
be centered on the means.
It is in this check to the agent's forward tendency that the
logical status of the means is evinced. As merely so much money the means
could only serve to further the execution of the purpose that is forming,
since under the circumstances it could only prompt immediate expenditure.
Like the subject in factual judgment, the means in economic judgment have
their problematic aspect which as effectually hinders the desired use of
them as could any palpable physical defect. This problematic aspect consists
in the fact of the present established mode of use which the now-forming
purpose threatens to disturb, and it is the agent's interest in this mode
of use that turns his attention to the valuation of the means.
It need hardly be pointed out that in the economic life we
find situations exactly corresponding to those of "° conscience and temptation"
and mechanical "pull and haul" which were discriminated in the ethical sphere
and marked off from judgment properly so called. Indeed it seems reasonable
to think, on general grounds of introspection, that these methods of decision
(if they deserve the name are, relatively speaking, more frequently relied
upon in the economic than in. (lie moral life. The economic method of tree
judgment is roundabout and more complex and more difficult than ethical,
and involves a more express recourse to those
(306) abstract conceptions which for the most part are only
implicitly involved in valuation of the other type. The economic type of
valuation, in fact, differs from the ethical, not in an absolute or essential
way, but rather in the explicitness with which it brings to light and lays
bare the vital elements in valuation as such. In general, then, the economic
process would seem necessarily to embrace three stages, which will first
of all be enumerated and then very briefly explained and discussed. These
are: (1) a preliminary consideration of the means necessary to attain the
end—which must be vague and tentative, of course, for the reason that the
end as imagined is so, as compared with the fulness of detail which must
belong to it before it can be finally accepted; (2) a consideration of the
means, as thus provisionally taken, in the light of their present devotion
to other purposes, this present devotion of them being the outcome, in some
degree at least, of past valuation; (3) final definition of the means with
reference to the proposed use through an adjustment effected between this
and the factors involved in the past valuation.
1. In the first stage as throughout, it must be carefully
noted, the means are under consideration not primarily in their physical
aspect, but simply as subject to a possible redisposition. Thus
it is not money as lawful currency receivable at the steamship office for
an ocean passage, nor tools and materials and labor-power technically suitable
for the production of a desired object, that is the subject of the economic
judgment. The problem of redisposition would of course not be raised were
the means not technically adaptable to the purpose, nor on the other hand
can the means in the course of economic judgment, as a rule, escape some
measure of further (factual) inquiry into their technical properties; but
the standpoints are nevertheless distinct. Again, it must be noted that
the means in this first stage will be only roughly measured. The length
of one's stay
(307) abroad, the size of the house one wishes to build,
the purpose whatever it may be, is still undefined—these are in fact the
very matters which the process must determine—and in the first instance
it is "money in general" or "a large sum of money" with reference to which
we raise the economic problem. The category of quantity is in fact essentially
an economic one; it is essentially a standpoint for determining the means
of action in such a way as to facilitate their economic valuation. The reader
familiar with the writings of the Austrian school of economists will easily
recall how uniformly in their discussions of the principle of marginal utility
these writers assume outright in the first place the division of the stock
of goods into definite units, and then raise the question of how the value
of a unit is measured. The stock contains already a hundred bushels of wheat
or ten loaves of breadapparently as a matter of metaphysical necessity—whereas
in fact the essential economic problem is this very one of how "wheat at
large" comes to be put in sacks of a certain size and "bread in general"
to be baked in twelve-ounce loaves. The subdivision of the stock and the
valuation of the unit are not successive stages, but inseparably correlative
phases of the valuation-process as a whole. The outcome may be stated either
way, in accordance with one's interest in the situation.
2. But the unmeasured means as redisposable in an as yet undetermined way
bring to consciousness established measured uses to which the means have
been heretofore assigned in definite amounts. In this way the process of
determining a definite quantum as redisposable (which is to say, of attaining
to a definite acceptable plan of conduct) can begin. How, then, does this
fact of past assignment to uses still recognized as desirable figure in
the situation? In the first place the past assignment may have been (1)
an outcome of past economic valuation, (2) an unhesitating or non-economic
(308) act executive of an ethical decision, or (3) an act
of more or less conscious obedience to "conscience" or " authority." In
either case it now stands as a course of conduct which at the time was,
in the way explained above, sanctioned to the agent, to the " energetic
" self, by the means and conditions recognized as bearing upon it. In this
sense, then, we have, in this recognition of the past adjustment and of
the economic character which the means now have in virtue of it, what we
may term a judgment of " energy-equivalence" between the means and their
established uses. For to the agent it was the essential meaning of the sense
of sanction felt when the means were assigned to these uses that the " energetic"
self would on the whole be furthered thereby —and this in view of all the
sacrifices that this use would entail, or in view of the sacrifices required
for the production of the means, if the case were one in which the means
were not at hand and could only be secured by a more or less extended production
process.
In the illustration we have been considering, it will be observed,
there is an extensive schedule of present use's which the new project calls
in question and from which the means must be diverted. This is in fact the
commoner case. A new use of money will affect, as a rule, not simply a single
present mode of expenditure, but will very probably involve a readjustment
throughout the whole schedule of expenditure which our separate past valuations
of money have in effect co-operated in establishing. So likewise if we wish
to use part of a store of building materials or of food, or of any other
subdivisible commodity, we encounter an ordered system of consumption rather
than a single predetermined use which we have not yet enjoyed. Where this
is the case the whole process of valuation is greatly facilitated, but this,
is not essential. The means in cases of true economic valuation may be capable
of but a single use, like a railroad ticket
(309) or a perishable piece of fruit, or of a virtually
endless series of uses, like a painting or a literary masterpiece. Whether
the means figure as representing but a single use or stand for the conservation
of an extensive system, their economic significance is the same. They are
the " energy-equivalent" of this use or system of uses considered as an
act or system of acts of consumption in furtherance of the self. Their past
assignment meant then and means now simply this, that the "energetic" self
would thereby gain more than it would lose through the inevitable sacrifices.
This is the economic significance of the means in virtue of which they are
now problematic to the extent of checking, for a time at least, forward
tendency toward the desired end.[40]
3. The judgment of energy-equivalence, then, defines the inhibiting
economic aspect of the means, and moreover defines it for the means as subdivided
and set apart for a schedule of uses if this was the form of the past adjustments
to which reference is made. The problem of the third stage of the process
is that of "bringing subject and predicate together," as we have elsewhere
expressed it —that is, of determining, in the light of the economic character
of the means as just ascertained, what measure of satisfaction, if any,
may be accorded to the new and as yet undefined desire. The new disposition
of the means, if one is to be made, must bring to the "energetic" self a
degree of furtherance and development which shall be sensibly as great as
would come from the established method of consumption. The means, as economic,
(310) are means to the conservation of the old adjustment,
and any new disposal of them or of any portion of them for a full or partial
execution of the new purpose must make out at least as good a case. It must
appear that the new disposition is not only physically possible, but also
economically necessary in the light of the same principle of expansion of
the self as sanctioned the disposition now in force. It must make the self
in some way more efficient —whether more strong and symmetrical in body,
more skilled in work, more clear of brain, or more efficient in whatever
other concrete way may be desired.
Psychologically the sanction of any course of action which
is taken as evidence of conformity to the general rule thus inadequately
stated is the more or less strong sense of "relaxation" of attentive strain
which comes with the shift of attention, in the final survey, from means
to end. We may accordingly, for the sake of greater definiteness, restate
in the following terms the process which has just been sketched: The ends
in conflict at the outset are ends which do not sensibly bear upon each
other through their dependence upon a common fund of psychical capacities
or energies. They are related in the agent's experience solely through their
dependence upon a common stock of physical means, and they do not therefore
admit of adjustment through the ethical type of process. The economic process
consists essentially of a revival in imagination of the experiences accompanying
the former disposition of the means and a re-enforcement by these of the
means in their adherence to that former and still recognized disposition.
If an adapted form of the new end can be imagined which will mediate a like
experience of relaxation when the attention shifts from the means, thus
emotionally re-enforced in their economic status, to the end as thus conceived,
the means will be recognized as economically redisposable. Thus the method
of
(311) valuation of the means makes possible, through appeal
to the sensibly invariable experience of relaxation or assurance in the
outcome of judgment, a co-ordination of disparate ends which the ethical
method of direct adjustment could not effect.[41]
The economic process thus presents on analysis the same factors
as does the ethical. On the subject side we have the means—which as economic
are problematic as to their reapplicability. On the predicate side we have
the suggested mode of reapplication in tension against conservative ideals
of application to established purposes. Just as it may be held that the
general ethical predicate is that of Right or Good—that is, deserving of
adoption into the system of one's ends—so the economic predicate applied
to the means as these come in the end to be defined is the general concept
Reappliable. And in general the distinction of the types is not an ultimate
one, for the more deliberately and rigorously the method of economic valuation
is pursuedin such a case, for example, as that of the prospective emigrant
—the stronger will be the agent's sense of a genuinely ethical sanction
as belonging to the decision which is in the end worked out. The more certain
and sincere, therefore, will be the agent's judgment that the means must
be reapplied, for on the sense of sanction of which we speak rests the explicit
judgment that the purpose formed is expansive of the self.
From the analysis thus presented it must appear, therefore,
that the economic type of judgment is in our sense a constructive process.
Its function is to determine a particular commodity or portion of a stock
of some commodity in its economic character as disposable, and
in performing this function it presents a definite reality in the economic
(312) order. Moreover, in thus defining the rarticular,
recourse is had to more or less distinctively namable economic standards
which are in the last resort symbols representing established habits of
consumption in the light of which the means, prima facie, seem not to be
available for any other purposes. These economic standards, like ethical
standards and the class concepts of science and our ordinary perceptual
experience, are, with all due respect to nominalism, constitutive of a real
world—a world which is real because it lends form and significance to our
knowledge of particulars as stimuli to conduct.
We have now before us sufficient reason for our thesis that
the valuation-process in both its forms is constructive of an order of reality,
and we have sufficiently explained the relation which the economic order
bears to the inclusive and logically prior order of ethical objects and
relations. We are now in a position to see that in being thus constructive
of reality (taking the conception in its proper functional meaning) they
are at the same time constructive of the self, since the reality which they
construct is in its functional aspect the assemblage of means and conditions,
of stimuli, in short, for the development and expansion of the self. We
shall bring this main division of our study to a close with a series of
remarks in explanation and illustration of this view.
Let us consider once more the factors present in the agent's
final survey of the situation after the completion of the judgment-process
and on the verge of action. These factors are, as we have seen, (1) recognition
of conditions sanctioning the purpose formed, (2) recognition of the purpose
as, in view of this sanction, warranted to the "energetic" self as an eligible
method of expansion and development, and (3) recognition of the "energetic"
self, conversely, as in possession, in virtue of the favorable conditions
given in
(313) factual judgment, of this new method of furtherance.
These three factors are manifestly not so much factors co-operating in the
situation as inseparable aspects of it distinguishable from each other and
admitting of discriminative emphasis in accordance with the degree of reflective
power which the individual may possess or choose to exercise. Strictly speaking
these three aspects are present in every conscious recognition of a purpose
as one's own and as presently to be carried into effect, but they are not
always present in equal conspicuousness, and never with equal logical importance
for the individual. In fact this enumeration of aspects coincides with our
enumeration of the three stages in the evolution of the individual's conscious
moral attitude toward new purposes given in impulse—in the third of which
the last named of these aspects comes to the fore with the others in logical
or functional subordination to it.
Now it will be apparent on grounds of logic, as on the evidence
of simple introspection, that in this third type of attitude—in the attitude
of true valuation, that is to say—the energetic self cannot be indentified
with the chosen purpose. The purpose is a determinate specified act to be
performed subject to recognized conditions, and with the use of the co-ordinated
means; the self, on the other hand, is a process to which this particular
purpose is, indeed, from the standpoint of the self's conservation and increase,
indispensable, but which is nevertheless apart from the purpose in the sense
that without the purpose it would still be a self, though perhaps a narrower
and less developed one. Our standpoint here as elsewhere, the reader must
remember, is the logical. It is the standpoint of the agent's own interpretation
of his experience of judgment during the judgment-process and at its close,
and not the standpoint of the psychological mediation of this experience
as a series of occurrences. Thus we are here far from wishing to deny the
(314) general proposition that a man's purposes are an expression
of his nature, as the psychologist might describe it, or the proposition
that a man's conduct and his character are one and the same thing viewed
from different points of view. We wish merely to insist upon the fact that
these psychological propositions are not a true account of the agent's own
experience of himself and of his purposes while these latter are in
the making or are on the verge of execution. There is indeed no conflict
between this "inside view" of the judgment-process and of the final survey
and the psychological propositions just mentioned. The identity of conduct
and character means not simply that as the man is so does he act, but quite
as much, and in a more important way, that as he acts so is he and so does
he become. It is, then, the essence of the agent's own view of the situation
that his character is in the making and that the purpose is the method to
be taken. To the agent the self is not, indeed, independent of the purpose,
for plainly it is recognized that upon just this purpose the self is, in
the sense explained, in a vital way dependent. Nevertheless the self is
in ,the agent's apprehension essentially beyond the purpose, and larger
than the purpose, and even, we may say, metaphysically apart from it. Now
the conclusion which we wish to draw from this examination of the agent's
attitude in judgment is that no formulation of an ideal self can ever be
adequate to his purposes, not simply because any such formulation must,
as Green allows, inevitably be incomplete and inconsistent, but because
the self as a process is in the agent's own apprehension of it inherently
incapable of formulation. Any formulation that might be attempted must be
in terms of particular purposes (since in a modern ethical theory the self
must be a "concrete" arid not an abstract universal), and it is easy to
see that any such would be, to the agent in the attitude of true ethical
judgment, worse than useless. It
(315) could as contentual and concrete only be a composite
of existing standards, more or less coherently put together, offered to
the agent as a substitute for the new standard which he is trying to work
out. If there were not need of a new standard there would be no judgment-process;
the agent must be, to say the least, embarrassed, even if the unwitting
imposture does not deceive him, when such a composite, useful and indeed
indispensable in its proper place as a standard of reference and a source
of suggestion, is urged upon him as suitable for a purpose which in the
very nature of the case it is logically incapable of serving.[42]
To the agent, then, the "energetic" self can never be represented
as an ideal—can never be expressed in terms of purpose—since it is in its
very nature logically incongruous with any possible particular purpose or
generalization of such purposes. It is commonly imaged by the agent in some
manner of sensuous terms, but it is imaged, in so far as the case is one
of judgment in a proper sense, for use as a stimulus to the methodical process
of valuation—not as a standard, which if really adequate would make valuation
unnecessary. The agent's consciousness of himself as "energetic" cannot
be an ideal; it comes to consciousness only through the endeavor, first
to follow, and then, in a later stage of moral development, to use ideals,
and has for its function, as a presentation, the incitement of the process
of methodical use of standards in the control of the agent's
(316) impulsive ends. It is not an anticipatory vision of
the final goal of life, but the agent's coming to consciousness of the general
impulse and movement of the life that is.
It is an inevitable consequence of acceptance of a contentual
view of the "energetic" self as one's ideal that reflective morality should
tend to degenerate into an introspective conscientiousness constantly in
unstable equilibrium between a pharisaical selfishness on the one hand and
a morally scarcely more dangerous hypocrisy on the other. There is certainly
much justice in the stinging characterization of "Neo-Hegelian Egoism" which
Mr. Taylor somewhere in his unsearchable book applies to the currently prevailing
conventionalized type of idealistic ethics. If the self of the valuation-process
is an ultimate goal of effort, then there must certainly be an irreconcilable
contrast to the disadvantage of the latter between the plain man's objective
desire for right conduct, as such, and for the welfare of his fellow-beings,
and the moralist's anxious questionings of the rectitude of the motives
by which his conformity to the fixed moral standard are prompted.[43]
Into the value and significance of the attitude of conscientious examination
of one's moral motives we are not here concerned to inquire, but need only
insist, in accordance with our present view, that its value must be distinctly
subordinate and incidental to the general course and outcome of the valuation-process.
In the valuation-process, consciousness of self is not an object of solicitude,
but simply, we repeat, a pure presentation of stimulus, having for its office
the incitement, and if need be the reincitement, of the attitude of deference
to the suggestions of old standards and openness to the petitions of new
impulse, and of methodically bringing these to bear upon each other.
(317)
The outcome of such a process, of course, cannot be predicted—and
for the same reasons as make unpredictable the scientist's factual hypothesis.
Just as the scientist's data are incomplete and ill-assorted and unorganized,
for the reason that they have, of necessity, been collected, and must at
the outset be interpreted, in the light of present concepts, whose inadequacy
the very existence of the problem at issue demonstrates, so the final moral
purpose that shall be developed is not to be deduced from any possible inventory
of the situation as it stands. The process in both cases is one of reconstruction,
and the test of the validity of the reconstruction must in both cases be
of the same essentially practical character. In both cases the process is
constructive of reality, in the functional signification of the term. In
both, the judgment process is constructive also of the self, in the sense
that upon the determination of the agent's future attitude the cumulative
outcome of his past attitudes is methodically brought to bear.[44]
V
Judgments of value are, then, objective in their import in
the same sense as are the factual judgments in which the conditions of action
are presented. The ideal problematic situation is, in the last resort, ethical,
in the sense of requiring for its solution determination of the new end
that has arisen with reference to existing standards. In structure and in
function the judgment in which the outcome of this process is presented
is knowledge, and objective in the only valid acceptation of the term.
(318)
But, after all, it may be urged, is it not the essential mark
of the objective that it should be accessible to all men, and not in the
nature of the case valid for only a single individual? At best the objectivity
of content which has been made out for the judgment of value is purely functional,
and not such as can be verified by appeal to the consensus of other persons.
The agent's assurance of the reality of the economic or ethical
subject-matter which he is endeavoring to determine, and his sense of the
objectivity of the results which he reaches, need not be denied. These may
well enough be illusions of personal prejudice or passion, or even normal
illusions of the reflective faculty, like that of interpreting the secondary
qualities of bodies as objective in the same sense as are the "bulk, figure,
extension, number, and motion of their solid parts."[45]
Any man can see the physical object to which I point, and verify with his
own eyes the qualities which I ascribe to it, but no man can either understand
or verify my judgment that the purpose I have formed is in accord with rational
ideals of industry and self-denial, or that this portion of my winter's
fuel may be given to a neighbor who has none.
But this line of objection proves too much, for, made consistent
with itself, it really amounts to a denial that the very judgment of sense-perception,
to which it appeals so confidently as a criterion, has objective import.
The first division of this study was intended to show that every object
(319) in the experience of each individual is for the individual
a unique construction of his own, determined in form and in details by individual
interests and purposes, and therefore different from that object in the
experience of any offer individual which in social intercourse passes current
as the same. The real object is for me the object which functions in my
experience, presenting problematic aspects for solution, and lending itself
more or less serviceably to my purposes; and this object is, we hold, not
the object as socially current, but the complete object which, as complete
in its determination with reference to my unique purposes, cannot possibly
have social currency. The objection as stated cuts away the very ground
on which it rests, since the shortcoming which it finds in the judgment
of ethical or economic value is present in the particular judgment of sense-perception
also. The object about which I can assure myself by an immediate appeal
to other persons is the object in its bare " conceptual " aspects — the
object as a dictionary might define it, the commodity as it might be described
in a trade catalogue, or the ethical act as defined by the criminal code
or in the treatise of a moral philosopher. It is an object consisting of
a central core or fixed deposit of meaning, which renders it significant
in a certain general way to a number of persons, or even to all men, but
which is not yet adequately known by me from the standpoint of my present
forming purpose. In virtue of these conceptual characters it is adaptable
to my purpose, which is as yet general and indeterminate; but in the nature
of the case it cannot yet be known to me as applicable to my prospective
concrete purpose, as this shall come to be through judgment.
Thus, if the test of objectivity of import is to be that the
judgment shall present an object or a fact which, as presented, is socially
current among men and not shut away in
(320) the individual intelligence apart from the possibility
o verification, then the apparent nominalism of the objection we are considering
turns out to be the uttermost extreme of realism. Such a test amounts to
a virtual affirmation that the sole objective reality is the conceptual,
and that the "accidents" of one's particular object of sense-perception
are the arbitrary play of private preference or fancy. At this point, however,
the objection may shift its ground and take refuge in some such position
as the following: The real object is indeed the object which the individual
knows in relation to his particular purpose, and it is indeed impossible
that the individual's judgment should be limited in its content to coincidence
with the conceptual elements of meaning which are socially current. The
building-stone which one has judged precisely fit for a special purpose,
the specimen which the mineralogist or the botanist examines under his microscope,
the tool whose peculiarity of working one has learned to make allowance
for in use—these all are, of course, highly individual objects, possessing
for the person in question an indefinite number of objective aspects of
which no other person can possibly be conscious at the time. And, more than
this, even though the individual may, in his scrutiny of the object, have
discovered no conspicuous new qualities in it which were not present in
the socially current meaning, the object will still possess an individuality
making it genuinely unique merely through its co-ordination with other objects
in the mechanical process of working out the purpose in hand. It is at least
an object standing here at just this time, a tool cutting this particular
piece of stone and striking at this instant with this particular ringing
sound, and these perhaps wholly nonessential facts will nevertheless servo
to individualize the object (if one chances to think of them) in the sense
of making it such a one as no other person knows. All this may be granted,
the objec-
(321) -tion may allow, and yet the vital point remains;
for this is not what it was intended, even in the first place, to deny.
The vital point at issue is not whether the object which I know is known
as I know it by any other person, but whether, in the nature of things,
it is one that can be so known.
Herein, then, lies the difference between judgments of fact
and judgments of value. The mineralogist can train his pupil to see precisely
what he himself sees; and so likewise in any case of sense-perception, the
object, however recondite may be the qualities or features which one may
see in it, can nevertheless be seen by any other person in precisely the
same way on the single, more often not insuperably difficult, condition
that the discoverer shall point these out or otherwise prepare the other
for seeing them. But with the ton of coal which one may judge economically
disposable for a charitable purpose the case stands differently, since it
is not in its visible or other physical aspects that the ton of coal is
here the subject of the judgment. It is as having been set apart by oneself
exclusively for other uses that the ton of coal now functions as an object
and now possesses the character which the economic judgment has given it;
and the case stands similarly with a contemplated act, of telling the truth
in a trying situation. The valuation placed upon the commodity or upon the
moral act depends essentially upon psychological conditions of temperament,
disposition, mood, or whim into which it would be impossible for another
person to enter, and these depend upon conditions of past training and native
endowment which can never occur or be combined in future in precisely the
same way for any other individual. In short, the physical object is describable
and can. be made socially current, though doubtless with more or less of
difficulty, if other persons will attend to it and learn to see it as I
see it; but the value
(322) of an economic object or a moral act depends upon
my desires and feelings, and therefore must remain a matter of my private
appreciation.
In answering this amended form of the objection it is entirely
unnecessary to discuss the issue of fact which it has raised as to whether
or not complete description of a physical object or event is a practical
or theoretical possibility. It need only be pointed out that at best such
complete description can only be successful in its purpose on condition
that the individual upon whom the experiment is tried be willing to attend
and have the requisite "apperceptive background." The accuracy with which
another person's knowledge shall copy the knowledge which I endeavor to
impart to him must manifestly depend upon these two leading conditions,
not to mention also the measure of my own pedagogical and literary skill.
Any consideration of such a purely psychological problem as is here suggested
would be entirely out of place in a discussion the purpose of which is not
that of analyzing the process of judgment, but that of interpreting its
meaning aspects. Let us grant the entire psychological possibility of making
socially current in the manner here suggested the most highly individual
and concrete cognition of an object one may please, and let us grant, moreover,
that this possibility has been actually realized. This concurrent testimony
of the witness will doubtless confirm one's impression of the accuracy of
the process of observation and inference whereby the knowledge which has
been imparted was first gained, but we must deny that it can do more than
this. For indeed, apart from some independent self-reliant conviction of
the objective validity of the knowledge in question, how should another's
assent be taken as confirmation and not rather as evidence of one's
own mere skill in suggestion and of the other's susceptibility thereto?
R e must deny that even in the improved form the criterion of social currency
is a valid
(323) one. In a word, the social currency of knowledge to
the extent to which it can exist requires as its condition, and is evidence
of, the equal social currency of certain interests, purposes, or points
of view for predication; and if it be possible to make socially current
an item of concrete knowledge, with all its concrete fulness of detail,
then a fortiori it must be possible to make socially current the concrete
individual purpose with reference to which this item of knowledge first
of all took form. Whether such a thing be psychologically possible at all
the reader may decide; but if it be possible in the sphere of knowledge
of fact, then it must be possible in the sphere of valuation. In short,
judgment in either field, in definition of a certain object or commodity
or moral act as, for the agent, an objective fact possessing certain characters,
involves the tacit assumption of social verifiability as a matter of course;
but it does not rest upon this assumption, nor is this assumption the essence
of its meaning. To say that my judgment is socially verifiable, that my
concrete object of perception or of valuation would be seen as I see it
by any person in precisely my place, is merely a tautological way of formally
announcing that I have made the judgment and have now a definite
object which to me has a certain definite functional meaning.
Thus, instead of drawing a distinction between the realms
of fact and value, as between what is or can be common to all intelligent
beings and what must be unique for each individual one, we must hold that
the two realms are coextensive. The socially current object answers to a
certain general type of conscious purpose or interest active in the individual
and so to a general habit of valuation, and the concrete object to a special
determination of this type of purpose with reference to others in the recognized
working system of life. The agent's final attitude, on the conclusion of
the judgment-process, may be expressed in either sort of
(324) judgment—in a judgment of the value of commodity or
moral purpose, or in a judgment of concrete fact setting forth the " external"
conditions which warrant the purpose to the "energetic" self. Throughout
the judgment-process there is a correlation between the movement whereby
the socially current object develops into the adapted means and that whereby
the socially current type of conduct develops into the defined and valued
purpose.[46]
At this point, however, a second general objection presents itself. However
individual the content of my knowledge of physical fact may be, and however
irrelevant, from the logical point of view, to my confidence in its objective
validity may be the possibility of sharing it with other persons, nevertheless
it refers to an object which is in some sense permanent, and therein differs
from my valuations. In economic valuation I reach a definition of a certain
commodity and am confirmed in it by all the conditions that enter into my
final survey of the situation. But my desire for the new sort of consumption
may fail, and so expose my valuation to easy attack from any new desire
that may arise; or my supply of the commodity in question may be suddenly
increased or diminished, and my valuation of the unit quantity thereby changed.
Likewise my ethical valuation may have to be reversed (as Mr. Taylor has
insisted) by reason of a change of disposition or particular desire which
makes impossible, except in obedience to some other and inclusive valuation,
further adherence to it. And these changes take place without any accompanying
sense of their doing violence to objective fact or, on the other hand, any
judgment of their
(325) being in the nature of corrections of previous errors
in valuation, and so more closely in accordance with the truth. Moreover,
a new valuation, taking the place of an old, does not supplement its predecessor
as one set of judgments about a physical object may supplement another,
made from a different point of view, but does literally take its place,
and this without necessarily condemning it as having been erroneous.
This general objection rests upon a number of fairly obvious
misconceptions, and its strength is apparent only. In the first place, the
question of the objectivity of any type of judgment must in the end, as
we have seen, reduce itself to a question of the judgment's import to the
agent. However the agent's valuations may shift from time to time, each
several one will be sanctioned to the agent by the changed conditions exhibited
in the inventory which the agent takes at the close of judgment which has
formed it. The conditions have changed, and the valuation of the earlier
purpose has likewise changed; but the new purpose is sanctioned by the new
conditions, and the test of the presumed validity of the new valuation can
only be in the manner already discussed[47] the test of
actual execution of the purpose. In the change, as the agent interprets
the situation, there is no violation of the former purpose nor a nearer
approach to truth. Each valuation is true for the situation to which it
corresponds. We are obviously not here considering the case of error. An
error in valuation is evidenced to the agent, not by the need of a new valuation
answering to changed conditions, but by the failure of a given valuation
to make good its promise, although to all appearance conditions have remained
unchanged. If the conditions have changed, then the purpose and the conditions
must be redetermined, if the expansion of the "ener-
(326) -getic" self is to continue; but the former valuation
does not thereby become untrue.
These brief remarks should suffice by way of answer, but it
will serve advantageously to illustrate our general position if we pursue
the objection somewhat farther. The physical object is, nevertheless, permanent,
it will be said, and this surely distinguishes it from the object (now
freely acknowledged as such of the value-judgment. To one man gold may be
soluble in aqua regia and to another worth so many pence an ounce,
but different and individual as are these judgments and the standpoints
they respectively imply, the gold is one, impartially admitting
at the same time of both characterizations. On the other hand, one cannot
judge an act good and bad at once. The purpose of deception that may be
good is one controlled and shaped by ideals quite different from those which
permit deception of the evil sort—is, in truth, taken as a total act, altogether
different from the purpose of deception which one condemns, and not, like
the "parcel of matter" in the two judgments about gold, the subject of both
valuations.
A brief consideration of the meaning of this "parcel of matter"
will easily expose the weakness of the plea. In the last analysis the "parcel
of matter" must for the agent reduce itself, let us say, to certain controllable
energies centering about certain closely contiguous points in space and
capable, in their exercise, of setting free or checking other energies in
the system of nature. Thus, put in aqua regia the gold will dissolve,
but in the atmosphere it retains its brilliant color, and in the photographer's
solution its energies have still a different mode of manifestation. And
thus it would appear that the various predicates which are applied to "gold"
imply, cach one, a unique set or conditions. Gold is soluble in aqua
regia, but not if it is to retain its yellow luster; which predicate
is to be true of it depends upon the
(327) conditions under which the energies " resident in
the gold" are to be set free, just as the moral character of an act depends
upon the social conditions obtaining at the time of its performance—that
is, upon the ideals with reference to which it has been shaped in judgment.
How can one maintain that in a literal and concrete physical sense gold
in process of solution is the "same" as gold entering into chemical combination?
Surely the energy conditions which constitute the "gold" in the two processes
are not the same—and can one nowadays hope to find sameness in unchangeable
atoms?[48]
In a word, the permanent substance or "real essence" that
admits of various mutually supplementary determinations corresponding to
diverse points of view is, strictly speaking, a convenient abstraction,
and not an existent fact in time—and we shall maintain that the same species
of abstraction has its proper place, and in fact occurs, in the sphere of
moral judgment. The type of moral conduct that in every actual case of its
occurrence in the moral order is determined in some unique and special way
by relation to other standards is precisely analogous to the "° substance"
that is now dissolved in aqua regia and now made to pass in the
form of current coin, but cannot be treated in both ways at once. Both are
abstractions. The "gold" is a name for the general possibility of attaining
any one of a certain set of particular ends by appropriately co-ordinating
certain energies, resident elsewhere in the physical system, with those
at present stored in this particular " parcel of matter;" the result to
be attained depends not alone upon the "parcel of matter," but also upon
the particular energies brought to bear upon it from without. Now let us
take a type of conduct which is sometimes judged good and sometimes bad.
Deception, for example, is such a type—and
(328) as a type it simply stands for the general possibility
of furtherance or detriment to the "energetic" self according as it is determined
in the concrete instance by ideals of social well-being or by considerations
of immediate personal advantage.
For the type—form of conduct—when considered, not as a type
of mere physical performance, but as conduct in the technical sense of a
possible purpose of the self—is, in the sense we have explained, a symbol
for the general possibility of access or dissipation of spiritual energy—energy
which must be set free by the bringing to bear of other energies upon it,
and which furthers or works counter to the enlargement and development of
the self according to the mode of its co-ordination with other energies
which the self has already turned to its purposes.[49]
But actual conduct is concrete always and never typical; and so likewise,
we have sought to show, actual "substance," the objective thing referred
to in the factual judgment, is always concrete and never an essence. It
is not a fixed thing admitting of a simultaneous variety of conflicting
determinations and practical uses, but absolutely unique and already determined
to its unique character by the whole assemblage of physical conditions which
affect it at the time and which it in turn reacts upon. In the moral as
in the physical sphere the fundamental category would, on our present account,
appear to be that of energy. The particular physical object given in judgment
is a concrete realization, in the form of a particular means or instrument,
of that general possibility of attaining ends which the concept of a fixed
fund of energy, interpreted as a logical postulate or principle of inference,
expresses. The particular moral or economic act is a particular way in which
the energy of the self may be increased
(329) or diminished. In both spheres the reality presented
in the finished judgment is objective as being a stimulus to the setting
free of the energies for which it stands. Once more, then, our answer to
the objection w e have been considering must be that the object as the permanent
substrate is merely an abstract symbol standing for the indeterminate means
in general set over against the self. Corresponding to it we have, on the
other side, the concept of the "energetic" self—the self that is purposive
in general, expansive somehow or other.
The function of completed factual judgment in the development
of experience is, we have held, that of warranting to the agent the completed
purpose which his judgment of value expresses. This view calls for some
further comment and illustration in closing the present division. In the
first place the statement implies that the conditions which factual judgment
presents in the "final survey" as sanctioning the purpose have not determined
the purpose, since prior to the determination of the purpose the conditions
were not, and could not be, so presented. The question, therefore, naturally
arises whether our meaning is that in the formation of our purposes in valuation
the recognition of existing conditions plays no part. Our answer can be
indicated only in the barest outline as follows:
The agent must, of course, in an economic judgment-process,
recognize and take account of such facts as the technical adaptability of
the means he is proposing to use to the new purpose that is forming, as
also of environing conditions which may affect the success which he may
meet with in applying them. He must consider also his own physical strength
and qualities of mind with a view to this same technical problem. And similarly
in ethical valuation, as we have seen, the psychology of the "empirical
ego"
(330) must play its part. But the conditions thus recognized
are, as we might seek to show more in detail, explainable as the outcome
of past factual judgment-processes, and on the occasion of their original
definition in the form in which they now are known played the sanctioning
part of which we have so often spoken. They therefore correspond to the
agent's accepted practical ideals, so that the control which his past experience
exercises over his present conduct may be stated equally well in either
sort of terms—in terms of his prevailing recognized standards, or in terms
of his present knowledge of the conditions which his new purpose must respect.
Thus, in general, the concept of a physical order conditioning the conduct
of all men and presented in a definite body of socially current knowledge
is the logical correlate of the moral law conceived as a categorical imperative
prescribing certain types of conduct.
Thus the error of regarding the agent's conduct in a present
emergency as an outcome of existing determining conditions is logically
identical with the corresponding error of the ethical theory of self-realization.
The latter holds the logical possibility of a determinate descriptive ideal
(already realized in the unchanging Absolute Self which is adequate to the
solution of all possible ethical problems. The former holds that all conduct
must be subject to the determining force of external conditions which, if
not at present completely known, are at least in theory knowable. The physical
universe in its original nebulous state contained the "promise and
potency" of all that has been in the way of human conduct and of all
that is to be. Into the fixed mechanical system no new energy can enter
and from it none of the original fund of energy can be lost. This mechanical
theory of conduct is the essential basis of the hedonistic theory of ethics;
and it would not be difficult to show that Green's criticism of this latter
and his
(331) own affirmative theory of the moral ideal (as also
the current conventional criticism of hedonism in the same tenor by the
school of Green are in a logical sense identical with it. For the assumption
that conduct is determined by existing objective conditions is precisely
the logical correlate of the concept of a contentual and " realizable"
ideal moral self.[50]
We may now interpret, in the light of our general view of
the function of factual judgment, the concept of the `° empirical self"
referred to in our discussion of the various types of sanctioning condition
which may enter into the final survey." The "empirical self"
of psychological science is a construction gradually put together by psychologist
or introspective layman as an interpretation of the way in which accepted
concrete modes of conduct, in the determination of which standards have
been operative, have worked out in practice to the furtherance or impoverishment
of the " energetic" self. We have seen that the ambiguous presented
self which functions in the moral attitude of obedience to authority or
to conscience gives place in the attitude of conscious valuation to apprehension
of the "energetic" self, on the one hand, and descriptive concepts
of particular types of conduct, on the other. The "empirical self"
at the same time makes its appearance as a constantly expanding inventory
of the "spiritual resources" which the "energetic" self
has at its disposal. These are the functions of the soul which a functional
psychology shows us in operation—powers of attention, strength of memory,
fertility in associative recall, and the like—and these are the resources
wherewith the "energetic" self may execute, and so exploit to
its
(332) own furtherance, the purposes which, in particular
emergencies, new end and recognized standards may work out in co-operation.[51]
VI
In the foregoing pages we have consistently used the expressions
"ethical and economic judgment" and "judgment of valuation" as synonymous.
This may have seemed to the reader something very like a begging of the
question from the outset, as taking for granted that very judgmental character
of our valuational experience which it was the professed object of our discussion
to establish. We are thus called upon very briefly to consider, first of
all, the relations which subsist between the consciousness of value and
the process which we have described as that of valuation. This will enable
us, in the second place, to determine the logical function which belongs
to the consciousness of value in the general economy of life. The consciousness
of value is a perfectly definite and distinctive psychical fact mediated
by a doubtless highly complex set of psychical or ultimately physiological
conditions. As such it admits of descriptive analysis, and in a complete
theory of value such descriptive analysis should certainly find a place.
It would doubtless
(333) throw much light upon the origin of valuation as a
process, and of valuing as an attitude, and admirably illustrate the view
of the function of the consciousness of value to which a logical study of
valuation as a process seems to lead us. This problem in analysis belongs,
however, to psychology, and therefore lies apart from our present purpose
; nor is it necessary to the establishment of our present view to undertake
it. It is necessary for our purpose only to suggest, for purposes of identification,
a brief description of the value-consciousness, and to indicate its place
in the process of reflective thought.
The consciousness of value may best be described, by way of first approximation,
in the language of the Austrian economists as a sense of the "importance"
to oneself of a commodity or defined moral purpose. It belongs to the agent's
attitude of survey or recapitulation which ensues upon the completion of
the judgment-process and is mediated by attention to the ethical or economic
object in its newly defined character of specific conduciveness to the well-being
of the self. The commodity, in virtue of its ascertained physical properties,
is adapted to certain modes of use or consumption which, through valuation
of the commodity, have come to be accepted as desirable. The moral act.
likewise has been approved by virtue of its having certain definite sociological
tendencies, or being conducive to the welfare and happiness of a friend.
Thus commodity or moral act, as the case may be, has a determinate complexity
of meaning which has been judged as, in one sense, expansive of the self,
and the value-consciousness we may identify as that sense of the valued
object's importance which is mediated by recognition of it as the bearer
of this complexity of concrete meaning. The meaning is, as we may say, "condensed"
or "compacted" into the object as given in sense-perception, and
because the meaning stands for ex-
(334) -pansion of the self, the object in taking it up into
itself receives the character of importance as a valued object.
The sense of importance thus is expressive of an attitude
upon the agent's part. The concrete meanings which make up the content of
the object's importance would inevitably, if left to themselves, prompt
overt action. The commodity would forthwith be applied to its new use or
the moral act would be performed. The self would, as we may express it,
possess itself of the spiritual energies resident in the chosen purpose.
The attitude of survey, however, inhibits this action of the self and the
sense of importance is the resulting emotional apprehension of the value
of the object hereby brought to recognition. Now, it should be carefully
observed that the particular concrete emotions appropriate to the details
of the valued purpose are not what we here intend. The purpose may spring
from some impulse of self-interest, hatred, patriotism, or love, and the
psychical material of its presentation during the agent's survey will be
the varied complex of qualitative emotion that comes from inhibition of
the detailed activities which make up the purpose as a whole. So also the
apprehension of the physical object of economic valuation is largely, if
not altogether, emotional in its psychical constitution. Psychologically
these emotions are the purpose—they are the "stuff" of which the purpose
as a psychical fact occurring in time is made. But we must bear in mind
that it is not the purpose as a psychical fact that is the object of the
agent's valuing—any more than is the tool with which one cuts perceived
as a molecular mass or as an aggregation of centers of ether-stress. As
a cognized object of value the purpose is, in our schematic terminology,
a source of energy for the increase of the self, and thus the consciousness
of value is the perfectly specific emotion arising from restraint put upon
the self in its movement of appropriation of this energy. In contrast with
the concrete emotions which
(335) are the substance of the purpose as presented, the
consciousness of value may be called a "formal" emotion or the
emotion of a typical reflective attitude.
The valuing attitude we may then describe as that of "resolution"
on the part of the self to adhere to the finished purpose which it now surveys,
with a view to exploitation of the purpose. The connection between the valuation-process
and the consciousness of value may be stated thus: The valuation-process
works out (and necessarily in cognitive, objective terms) the purpose which
is valued in the agent's survey. But this development of the purpose is
at the same time determination of the "energetic" self to acceptance
of the purpose that shall be worked out. Thus the valuation-process is the
source of the consciousness of value in the twofold way (1) of defining
the object valued, and (2) of determining the self to the attitude of resolution
to adhere to it and exploit it.[52] The consciousness of
value is the apprehension of an object in its complete functional character
as a factor in experience.
The function of the consciousness of value must now be very
briefly considered. The phenomenon is a striking one, and apparently, as
the economists especially have insisted, of much practical importance in
the conduct of life.[53] And yet on our account of the
phenomenon, as it may appear, the problem of assigning to it a function
must be, to say the least, difficult. For the consciousness of value is,
we have held, emotional, and, on the conception of emotion in general which
we have taken for granted throughout our present discussion, this mode of
being conscious is merely a reflex of a state of tension in activity. As
such it merely reports in consciousness a process of motor co-ordination
already going on and in the nature of the case can contribute nothing to
the outcome.
(336)
Now if it were in a direct way as immediately felt emotion
that the consciousness of value must be functional if functional at all,
then the problem might well be given up; but it would be a serious blunder
to conceive the problem in this strictly psychological way. A logical statement
of the problem would raise a different issue—not the question of whether
emotion as emotion can in any sense be functional in experience, but whether
the consciousness of value and emotion in general may not receive reflective
interpretation and thereby, becoming objective, play a part as a factor
in subsequent valuation-processes. Indeed, the psychological statement of
the problem misses the entire point at issue and leads directly to the wholly
irrelevant general problem of whether any mode of consciousness whatever
can, as consciousness, put forth energy and be a factor in controlling
conduct. The present problem is properly a logical one. What is the agent's
apprehension of the matter? In his subsequent reflective processes of valuation
does the consciousness of value, which was a feature of the survey on a
past occasion, receive recognition in any way and so play a part? This is
simply a question of fact and clearly, as a question relating to the logical
content of the agent's reflective process, has no connection with or interest
in the problem of a possible dynamic efficacy of consciousness as such.
The question properly is logical, not psychological or metaphysical.
Thus stated, then, the problem seems to admit of answer —and
along the line already suggested in our account of economic valuation.[54]
Recognition of the fact that the consciousness of value was experienced
in the survey of a certain purpose on an earlier occasion confirms this
purpose, holding the means, in an economic situation, to their appointed
use and strengthening adherence to the standard in the ethical
(337) case. This recognition serves as stimulus to a reproduction,
in memory, of the cognitive details of the earlier survey, and so in the
ideal case to a more or less complete and recognizably adequate reinstatement
of the earlier valuing attitude, and so to a reinstatement of the consciousness
of value itself. The result is a strengthening of the established valuation,
a more efficacious control of the new end claiming recognition, and an assured
measure of continuity of ethical development from the old valuation to the
new. The function thus assigned to the consciousness of value finds abundant
illustration elsewhere in the field of emotion. The stated festivals of
antiquity commemorative of regularly recurrent phases of agricultural and
pastoral life, as also the festivals in observance of signal events in the
private and political life of the individual, would appear to find, more
or less distinctly, here their explanation. These festivals must have been
prompted by a more or less conscious recognition of the social value inherent
in the important functions making up the life of the community, and of the
individual citizen as a member of the community and as an individual. They
secured the end of a sustained and enhanced interest in these normal functions
by effecting, through a symbolic reproduction of these, an intensified and
glorified experience of the emotional meaning normally and inherently belonging
to them.[55] In the same way the rites of the religious
cults of Greece, not to mention kindred phenomena so abundantly to be found
in lower civilizations as well as in our own, served to fortify the individual
in a certain consistent and salutary course of institutional and private
life.[56]
(338)
It has been taken for granted throughout that there are but
two forms of valuation-process, the ethical and the economic. The reason
for this limitation may already be sufficiently apparent, but it will further
illustrate our general conception of the valuation-process briefly to indicate
it in detail. What shall be said, for example, of the common use of the
term "value" in such expressions as the "value of life," the "emotional
value" of an object or a moral act, the "natural value" of a type of impulsive
activity? In these uses of the word the reference is apparently to one's
own incommunicable inner experience of living, of perception of the object,
or of the impulse, which cannot be suggested to any other person who has
not himself had the experience. My pleasure, my color-sensation in its affective
aspect, my emotion, are inner and subjective, and I distinguish them by
such expressions as the above from the visible, tangible object to which
I ascribe them as constituting its immediate or natural value to me. This
broader use of the term "value" has not found recognition in the foregoing
pages, and it requires here a word of comment. So long as these phases of
the experience of the object are not recognized as separable in thought
from the object viewed as an external condition or means, they would apparently
be better characterized in some other way. If, however, they are so recognized,
and are thereby taken as determinative of the agent's practical attitude
toward the thing, we have merely our typical situation of ethical valuation
of some implied purpose as conducive to the self and economic valuation
of the means as requisites for
(339) execution of the purpose. Our general criterion for
the propriety of terming any mode of consciousness the value of an object
must be that it shall perform a logical function and not simply be referred
to in its aspect of psychical fact. The feeling or emotion, or whatever
the mode of consciousness in question may be, must play the recognized part,
in the agent's survey of the situation, of prompting and supporting a definite
practical attitude with reference to the object. If, in short, the experience
in question enters in any way into a conscious purpose of the agent, it
may properly be termed a value.[57]
Aesthetic value also has not been recognized, and for the
opposite reason. The sense of beauty would appear to be a correlate of relatively
perfect attained adjustment between the agent and his natural environment
or the conditions suggested more or less impressively by the work of art.
There must, indeed, be present in the aesthetic experience an element of
unsatisfied curiosity sufficient to stimulate an interest in the changing
or diverse aspects of the beautiful object, but this must not be sufficient
to prompt reflective judgment of the details presented. On the whole, the
aesthetic experience would appear to be essentially post-judgmental and
appreciative. It comes on the particular occasion, not as the result of
a judgment-process of the valuational type, but as an immediate appreciation.
As an immediate appreciation it has no logical function and on our principles
must be denied the name of value. Our standpoint must be that of the experiencing
individual. The aesthetic experience as a type may well be a development
out of the artistic and so find
(340) its ultimate explanation in the psychology of man's
primitive technological occupations in the ordinary course of life. It is,
as we have said, of the post-judgmental type, and so may very probably be
but the cumulative outcome of closer and closer approximations along certain
lines to a perfected adjustment with the conditions of life. It may thus
have its origin in past processes of the reflective valuational type. Nevertheless,
viewed in the light of its actual present character and status in experience,
the aesthetic must be excluded from the sphere of values.
Thus the realms of fact and value are both real, but that
of value is logically prior and so the " more real." The realm
of fact is that of conditions warranting the purposes of the self; as a
separate order, complete and absolute in itself, it is an abstraction that
has forgotten the reason for which it was made. Reality in the logical sense
is that which furthers the development of the self. The purpose that falls
short of its promise in this regard is unreal—not, indeed, in the psychological
sense that it never existed in imagination, but in the logical sense that
it is no longer valued. Within the inclusive realm of reality the realm
of fact is that of the means which serve the concrete purposes which the
self accepts. The completed purpose, however, is not means, since
still behind and beyond it there can be no other concrete valued purpose
which it can serve. Nor is it an ultimate end, since in its character
of accepted and valued end the self adheres to it, and it therefore cannot
express the whole purpose of the self to whose unspecifiable fulness
and increase of activity it is but a temporary probational contributor.
It is rather in the nature of a formula or method of behavior to which the
golf ascribes reality by recognizing and accepting it as its own.
Endnotes
- Considerations of space as well as circumstances attending the immediate
preparation of this discussion for the press have precluded any but
the most general and casual reference to the recent literature of the
subject. Much of this literature only imperfectly distinguishes the
logical and psychological points of view, so that critical reference
to it, unaccompanied by detailed restatement and analysis of the positions
criticised, would be useless.
- In order to avoid complicating the problems, we have here employed
the common notion that the physical world, physical object, and property
may be taken for granted as possible adequate contents of judgment,
and that the problem is only as to the objectivity of economic and ethical
contents. Of course we may, in the cud, come to believe that the
"physical" object is itself an economic construct, in the large
sense of "economic;" that is. an instrument of an effective
or successful experience. Thus in terms of the illustration used above,
in the attitude of entertaining in a general way the plan of building
a house of some sort or other, one may have before him various
building materials the ascertained qualities of which are, it may be,
socially recognized as in a general way fitting them for such a use.
There is doubtless so much of real foundation for the common notion
here referred to. But along with the definition of the plan
in ethical and economic judgment, along with the determination actually
to build a house, and a house of a certain specific kind, must
go further determination of the means in their physical aspects,
a determination which all the while reacts into the process of determination
of the end. See below, p. 216, note 3.
- In the moral life, as elsewhere, the distinction of deduction and
induction is one of degree. There is but one type or method of inference,
though some inferences may approach more closely than do others the
limit of pure " "subsumption."
- See III below.
- It is no part of the present view that the ends which enter into economic
conflict are incapable of becoming organic and intrinsically interrelated
members of the provisional system of life. On the contrary, the very
essence of our contention is that adjustment established between two
such conflicting ends in economic judgment is in itself ethical and
a member of the provisional system of the individual's ends of life,
and will stand as such, subject to modification through changes elsewhere
in the system, so long as the economic conditions in view of which it
was determined remained unchanged. The "mutual exclusiveness"
of the ends in ethical deliberation is simply the correlate of a relative
fixity in certain of the conditions of life. A man's command over the
means of obtaining such things as books and fuel varies much and often
suddenly in a society like ours from time to time; but, on the other
hand, his physical condition, his intelligence, his powers of sympathy,
and his spiritual capacity for social service commonly do not. Hence
there can be and is a certain more or less definite and permanent comprehensive
scheme of conduct morally obligatory upon him so far as the exercise
of these latter faculties is concerned, but so far as his conduct depends
upon the variable conditions mentioned, it cannot be prescribed in general
terms, nor will any provisional ideal of moral selfhood admit any such
prescriptions as integral elements into itself. The moral self is an
ideal construct based upon they" fixed conditions of life conditions
so fixed that the spiritual furtherance or deterioration likely to result
from certain moles of conduct involving and affecting them can be estimated
directly and with relative ease by the " ethical" method of
judgment. Implied in such a construct is, of course, a reference to
certain relatively permanent social and also physical conditions. In
so far as society and physical nature, and for that matter the individual's
own nature, are variable, these are the subjects of "scientific"
or "factual" judgments incidental to the determination of
problems by the "economic" method—problems, that is, for which
no general answer, through reference to a more or less definite and
stable working concept of the self, can be given. Thus our knowledge
of the physical universe is largely, if not chiefly, incidental to and
conditioned by our economic experience. Again, our economic judgments
are in every case determinative of the self in situations in which,
as presented by (perhaps even momentarily) variable conditions, physical,
social, or personal, the ethical method is inapplicable. In a socialistic
state, in which economic conditions might be more stable than in our
present one, many problems in consumption which now are economic in
one sense would be ethical because admitting of solution by reference
to the type of self presupposed in the established state program of
production and distribution. Even now it is not easy to specify all
economic situation the solution of which is absolutely indifferent ethically.
There is a possibility of intemperance even in so "aesthetic"
an indulgence as Turkish rugs.
- Accordingly there can be no distinction of ends, some as ethical,
others as economic, but from an ethical standpoint indifferent, and
yet others as amenable neither to ethical nor to economic judgment.
The type of situation and the corresponding mode of judgment employed
determines whether an end shall be for the time being ethical, economic,
or of neither sort conspicuously.
- The right of Prudence to rank among the virtues cannot, on our present
view, be questioned. Economic judgment, though it must be valuation
of means, is essentially choice of ends—and as would appear, choice
of a sort peculiarly difficult by reason of the usually slight intrinsic
relation between the ends involved and also by reason of the absence
of effective points of view for comparison. Culture, as Emerson remarks,
" sees prudence not to be a several faculty, but a name for wisdom
and virtue conversing with the body and its wants." And again,
"The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of
sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy . . . . . [The true
prudence] takes the laws of the world whereby man's being is conditioned,
as they are, and keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good"
(Essay on Prudence).
- Here again we purposely use inaccurate language. Strictly, the ends
here spoken of as competing are such, we must say, only because they
are as yet in a measure indeterminate, wanting in "clearness,"
and are not yet understood in their true economic character; likewise
the means are wanting in that final shade or degree of physical and
mechanical determinateness which they are presently to possess as means
to a finally determinate economic end. Thus economic judgment, by which
is to be understood determination of an end of action by the economic
method and in accordance with economic principles, involves in general
physical re-determination of the means. The means which at the outset
of the present economic judgment-process appear as physically available
indifferently for either of the tentative ends under consideration are
only in a general way the same means for knowledge as they will be when
the economic problem has been solved. They are, so far as now determinate,
the outcome of former physical judgment-processes incidental to the
definition of economic ends in former situations like the present.
- In our discussion of this preliminary question there is no attempt
to furnish what might be, called an analysis of the consciousness
of objectivity. This has bean undertaken by various psychologists
in recent well-known contributions to the subject. For our purpose it
is necessary only to specify the intellectual and practical attitude
out of which the consciousness of objectivity arises; not the sensory
" elements" or factors involved in its production as an experience.
- So, on the other hand, our vague organic sensations are possibly more
instructive as they are, for their own purpose, than they would
be if more sharply discriminated and complexly referred.
For convenience we here meet the view under consideration with its own
terminology; we by no means wish to be understood as indorsing this
terminology as psychologically correct. The sense-quality of which we
read in "structural psychology" is, we hold, not a structural
unit at all, but in fact a highly abstract development out of that unorganized
whole of sensory experience in which reflective attention begins. There
is, for example, no such thing as the simple unanalyzable sense-quality
" red " in consciousness until judgment has proceeded far
enough to have constructed a definite and measured experience which
may be symbolized as "object-before-me-possessing-the-attribute-red."
In place of the original sensory total-experience we now have a more
or less developed perceptual (i.e., judgmental) total-experience.
It is an instance of the "psychological fallacy" to interpret
what are really elements of meaning in a perceived object . constructed
in judgment (for this is the true nature of the "simple idea of
sensation" or "sense-element") as so many hits of psychical
material which were isolated from each other at the outset, and have
been externally joined together in their present combination.
- The phrase is Kulpe's and is used in his sense of consciousness taken
as a whole, as, for example, attentive, apperceptive, volitional, rather
than in the sense made familiar by Spencer and others.
- The foregoing discussion is in many ways similar to Brentano's upon
the same subject. In discussing his first class of modes of consciousness,
the Vorstellungen, he says: "we find no contrasts between
presentations excepting those of the objects to which the presentations
refer. Only in so far as warm and cold, light and dark, a high note
and a low, form contrasts can we speak of the corresponding presentations
as contrasted; and, in general, there is in any other sense than this
no contrast within the entire range of these conscious processes"
(Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte, Bd. I, p. 29). This
may stand as against any attempt to find contrast between abstract sense-qualities
taken apart from their objective reference. What is, however, the ground
of distinction between the presented objects? Apparently this must ho
answered in the lust resort as above. In this sense we should need finally
to interpret "sensuous and "material" in terms of objectivity
as above defined, rather than the reverse. They are cases in or specifications
of the determination of adequate stimuli.
- In this connection reference may be made to the well-known disturbing
effect of the forced introduction of attention to details into established
sensori-motor co-ordinations, such as "typewriting," playing
upon the piano, and the like.
- Cf. PROFESSOR BALDWIN'S Social and Ethical Interpretations, and
PROFESSOR McGILVARY'S recent paper on "Moral Obligation,"
Philosophical Review, Vol. XI, especially pp. 349
f.
- Manifestly, as indicated just above, this accepted value of the object
implies fuller physical knowledge of the object than was possessed at
the outset of the economic judgment. See above, p. 234, note; p. 246,
note 3; and p, 271, below.
- Types of Ethical Theory, Vol. II, p. 5.
- See p. 253 above.
- It is not so much the case that the object, on the one side, excites
in the agent's consciousness, on the other, the " sensations of
resistance" which have played such a part in recent controversy
on the subject, as that (1) the object in certain of its promptings
is "resisting" certain other of its promptings, or that (2)
certain "positive" activities of the agent are being inhibited
by certain "negative" activities, thereby giving rise to the
"emotion of resistance." That "positive" and "negative
" are here used in a teleological way will be apparent. It is surely
misleading to speak of "sensations of resistance " even
in deprecatory quotation marks, except as "sensation" is used
in its everyday meaning, viz., experience of strongly sensory quality.
- The general theory of emotion which is here presupposed, and indeed
is fundamental to the entire discussion, may be found in PROFESSOR DEWEY'S
papers on " The Theory of Emotion," Psychological Review,
Vol. I, p. 553; Vol. II, p. 13.
- Such is, in fact, the teaching of the various forms of ethical intuitionism,
and we find it not merely implied, but explicitly affirmed, in a work
in many respects so remote from intuitionism in its standpoint as GREEN'S
Prolegomena to Ethics. See pp.178-81, and especially pp. 355-9.
- Sermon II.
- Not to imply of course that psychologically or logically the distinction
of conditions and means is other than c1 Convenient superficial one.
- Manifestly we have here been approaching from a new direction the
"Recognition coefficient" of reality described above. See
p. 266.
- This, if it were intended as an account of the genesis of psychology
as a science and of the psychological interest on the part of the individual,
would doubtless be most inadequate. We have, for one thing, made no
mention of the part which error and resulting practical failure play
in stimulating an interest in the judgmental processes of observation
and the like, and in technique of the control of these. Here, as well
as in the processes of execution of our purposes, must be found
many of the roots of psychology a, a science. Moreover, no explanation
has been offered above for 1116 appropriation by the "energetic"
self of these phenomena of interruption and retardation of its energy
as being, in fact, its own, or within itself. The problem would appear
to be psychological, and so without our province, and we gladly pass
it by.
- We can, of course, undertake no minute analysis of the psychological
mechanism or concatenation of the process here sketched in barest outline.
Our present purpose is wholly that of description. Slight as our account
of the process of transition is, we give it space only because it seems
necessary to do so in order to make intelligible the accounts yet to
be given of the conscious valuation processes for which the movement
here described prepares the way.
It will be observed that we assume above that the purpose is successful
as planned and by succeeding brings about the undesirable results.
Failure in execution of the purpose as such could only, in the manner
already outlined, prompt a more adequate investigation of the factual
conditions.
- The case is not essentially altered in logical character if for the
Levitical law be substituted the general principles of the new dispensation
read off into details by an authoritative church or by "private
judgment."
- A remark may be added here by way of caution. The presented self,
we have said, attenuates to a mere maxim or tacit presumption in favor
of a certain type of logical procedure in dealing with the situation.
It must be remembered that the presented self, like all other presentation,
is and comes to be for the sake of its function in experience, and so
is practical from the start. The process sketched above is therefore
not from bare presented content as such to a methodological presumption,
which, as methodological and not contentual, is qualitatively different
from what preceded it.
- Recognized authority is, of course, not the same thing by
any means as authority unrecognized because absolutely dominant.
- We may be pardoned for supplying from the history of ethics no illustrations
of this slight sketch.
- In fact as suggested above, the Prolegomena Lo Ethics is
in many respects essentially intuitional in spirit, though its intuitionism
is of a modern discreetly attenuated sort.
- This would appear to be the logical value of functional psychology
as a science of mental process.
- We have already given a slight sketch of the historical process here
characterized in the barest logical terms.
- Further consideration of the problem of factual judgment must be deferred
to Part V.
- The relation of the empirical self to the "energetic" and
to standards will come in for statement in Part V in the connection
just referred to.
- It might be possible to construct a "logic" of those various
types of working moral standard in such a way as to show
that in each type there is implied the one next higher morphologically,
and ultimately the highest—that is, some sort of concept of the "
energetic" self.
- It matters not at all whether, in ethics or metaphysics, our universal
be abstract or on the other hand "concrete," like Green's
conception of the self, or a "Hegelian " Absolute. Its logical
use in the determination of particulars must be essentially the same
in either case.
- In this connection reference may be made to Mr. TAYLOR'S recent work,
The Problem of Conduct. Mr. Taylor reduces the moral life to
terms of an ultimate conflict between the ideals of egoism and social
justice, holding that the conflict is in theory irreconcilable. With
this negative attitude toward current standards in ethical theory one
may well be in accord without accepting Mr. Taylor's further contention
that a theory of ethics is therefore impossible. Because the "ethics
of subsumption " is demonstrably futile it by no means follows
that a method of ethics cannot be developed along the lines of modern
scientific logic which shall be as valid as the procedure of the investigator
in the sciences. Mr. Taylor's logic is virtually the same as
that of the ethical theories which he criticises; because an ethical
ideal is impossible, a theory of ethics is impossible also. One is reminded
of Mr. BRADLEY'S criticism of knowledge in the closing chapters of the
Logic as an interesting parallel.
- MR. BOSANQUET'S discussion Of the place of the principle of teleology
in analogical inference will be found suggestive in this connection
(Logic, Vol. II, chap. iii).
- See above, p. 243 and p. 259 ad fin.
- We use the expression " energy-equivalent" because the "excess"
gained by the self through the past adjustment is not of importance
at just this point. The essential significance of the means now is not
that they "cost" less than they promised to bring in in energy,
but that because they required sacrifice the self will now lose
unless they are allowed to fulfil the promise. They are
the logical equivalent of the established modes of consumption from
the standpoint of conservation of the energies of the self, not the
mathematical equivalent.
It would be desirable, if there were space, to present a brief account
of the psychological basis of the concepts of energy and energy-equivalence
which here come into play, but this must be omitted.
- Putting it negatively, the renunciation of the new end involves a
"greater" sacrifice than all the sacrifices which adherence
to the present system of consumption can compensate.
- Green, as is well known, allows that any formulation of the ideal
self must he incomplete, but holds that it is not for this reason useless.
But this is to assume that development in the ideal is never to be radically
reconstructive, that the ideal is to expand and fill out along established
and unchangeable lines of growth so that all increase shall be in the
nature of accretion. The self as a system is fixed and all individual
moral growth is in the nature of approximation to this absolute ideal.
This would appear to be essentially identical in a logical sense with
Mr. Spencer's hypothesis of social evolution as a process of gradual
approach to a condition of perfect adaptation of society and the individual
to each other in an environment to which society is perfectly adapted—a
condition in which " perfectly evolved" individuals shall
live in a state of blessedness in conformity to the requirements of
"absolute ethics." For a criticism of this latter type of
view see MR. TAYLOR'S above-mentioned work (chap. v, passim).
- For GREEN'S cautious defense of conscientiousness as a moral attitude
see the Prolegomena to Ethics, Book IV, chap. i; and for a
statement of the present point of view as bearing upon Green's difficulty,
see DEWEY, The Study of Ethics: A Syllabus, p. 37 ad fin.,
and Philosophical Review, Vol. II, pp. 661, 662.
- Along the line thus inadequately suggested might be found an answer
to certain criticisms of the attempt to dispense with a metaphysical
idea of the self. Such criticisms usually urge that without reference
to a metaphysical ideal no meaning attaches to such conceptions as "adjustment,"
"expansion," "furtherance," and the like as predicated
.>f the moral acts of as agent in their effect upon the "energetic"
self. Anything that one may do, it is sail, is expansive of
the self, if it be something new, except as we judge it by a metaphysical
ideal of a rightly expanded self. For an excellent statement of this
general line of criticism see STRATTON, "A Psychological Test of
Virtue," International Journal of Ethics, Vol. XI, p. 200.
- The polemic of certain recent writers (as, for example, EHRENFELS
in his System der Werttheorie) against the objectivity of judgments
of value appears to rest upon an uncritical acceptance of the time-honored
distinction between "primary" and "secondary" qualities
as equivalent to the logical distinction of subjective and objective.
Thus EHRENFELS confutes "das Vorurteil von der objectiven Bedeutung
des wertbegriffes" by explaining it as due to a misleading usage
of speech expressive of "an impulse, deep-rooted in the human understanding.
to objectify it, presentations" and then goes on to say "We
do not desire things because we recognize the presence in them of a
mysterious impalpable essence of Value but the ascribe value to them
because we desire them." (Op. cit., Bd. I, p. 2.) This
may serve to illustrate the easy possibility of confusing the logical
and psychological points of view, as likewise does EHRENFELS'S formal
definition of value. (Bd. I, p. 65.)
- The essential dependence of factual judgment upon the rise of economic
and ethical conflict is implied in the widely current doctrine of the
teleological character of knowledge. It is indeed nowadays something
like a commonplace to say in one sumo or another that knowledge is relative
to ends, hat it is ant, always recognized by those who hold this view
that an and never appears as such in consciousness alone. The end that
guides in the construction of factual knowledge is an end in ethical
or economic conflict with some other likewise indeterminate end in the
manner above discussed.
- See above, pp. 282, 283.
- Cf. SCHILLER, Riddles of the Sphinx, chap. vii,
§§10-14.
- It would appear that the principle of the conservation of energy is
valid only in the physical sphere; but the logical significance of this
limitation cannot be here discussed.
- That the assumption mentioned is the essential basis of the twin theories
of associationism in psychology and hedonism in ethics is shown by Dr.
WARNER FITE in his article, "The Associational Conception of Experience,"
Philosophical Review, Vol. IX, pp. 283 ff. Cf. Mr.
BRADLEY'S remarks on the logic of hedonism in his Principles
of Logic, pp. 244-9.
- The "energetic "self is apparently Mr. BRADLEY'S fourth
"meaning of self," the self as monad"something moving
parallel with the life of a man, or, rather, something not moving, but
literally standing in relation to his successive variety"
(Appearance and Reality [1st ed.] p. 86, in chap. ix, "The
Meanings of the Self"). Mr. Bradley's difficulty appears to come
from his desiring a psychological content for what is essentially a
logical conception—a confusion (if we may be permitted the remark) which
runs through the entire chapter to which we refer and is responsible
for the undeniable and hopeless incoherency of the various meanings
of the self, as Mr. Bradley therein expounds thorn. "If the monad
stands aloof," says Mr. Bradley, "either with no character
at all or a private character apart, then it may be a fine thing in
itself, but it is a mere mockery to call it the self of a man "
(p. 87). Surely this is to misconstrue and then find fault with that
very character of essential logical apartness from any possibility of
determination in point of descriptive psychological content which constitutes
the whole value of the "energetic" self as a logical conception
stimulative of the valuation-process and so inevitably of factual judgment.
See pp. 258, 259, above. The realer may find for himself in Mr. Bradley's
enumeration of meanings our concept of the empirical self. But surely
the "energetic" and empirical selves would appear on our showing
to have no necessary conflict with each other.
- In the first of these inseparable aspects valuation is determinative
of Rightness and Wrongness; in the second it presents the object as
Good or Bad. See p. 259, above.
- See, for example, WIESER, Natural Value (Eng. trans.), p.17.
- See pp. 307-12 above.
- The illustration, as also the general principle which it here is used
to illustrate, was suggested some years since by Professor G. H. Mead
in a lecture course on the "History of Psychology," which
the writer had the advantage of attending.
- The conservative function of valuation may he further illustrated
by reference to the well-known principle of marginal utility of which
we have already made mention (p. 307 above), and which has played so
great a part in modern economic theory. The value of the unit quantity
of a stock of any commodity is, according to this principle, measured
by the least important single use in the schedule of uses to which the
stock as a whole is to be applied. Manifestly, then, adherence to this
valuation placed upon the unit quantity is in so far conservative of
the whole schedule and the marginal value is a " short-hand "
symbol expressive of the value of the whole complex purpose presented
in the schedule. Moreover. the increase of marginal value concurrently
with diminution of the stock through consumption, loss, or reapplication
is not indicative so much of a change of purpose as of determination
to adhere to so much of the original program of consumption as may still
be possible of attainment with the depleted supply of the commodity.
- Thus except on this condition we should deny the propriety of speaking
of the value of a friend or of a memento or sacred relic. The purpose
of accurate definition of the function of such objects as these in the
attainment of one's ends is foreign to the proper attitude of loving,
prizing, or venerating them. We may ethically value the act of sacrifice
for a friend or of solicitous care of the memento, but the object of
our sacrifice or solicitude has simply the direct or immediate "qualitative
"emotional character appropriate to the kinds of activity to which
it is the adequate stimulus.
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