X (continued 2)

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 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 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.[130]

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 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 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.[131]

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 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 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.[132] 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 over-conservative adherence to the established and the accredited as such.[133]

The argument of the last few paragraphs may be restated 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 conduct. 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 obedience 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 and after. In one of its aspects it is a self which has come to miss (and therefore to image for itself) the values and, it may be, a certain dawning sense of vitality and growth which obedience to authority once afforded.[134] 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.[135]

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.[136] 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 non-presentational principle of valuation, and (2) a setting apart of these elements of content from the principle of valuation 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.

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 make of me in the end a less useful member of society than I am at present? These and other questions like them present the issue in its earlier aspect. Presently, however, the tentative purpose puts in its defense, appealing to yet other recognized ideals or standards of self-sacrifice, 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 are not true of the situation there must be a resort to economic judgment.

By the general questions suggested above as presenting 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 be familiar with in many former situations perhaps wholly different in superficial aspect from from the present one.

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.[137] 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 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 direct method of an apportionment between them of the "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.[138] 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.[139] Finally, in the construction of purposes and reconstruction 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.[140]

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 standards—standards 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.[141] 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, 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 mediæval 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 readjustment 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 "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 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,[142] but of such a principle as that of the conservation of energy, for example, in scientific inference.[143]

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—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.[144]

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 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 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 calling for adjustment. We must make a choice between amusement or intellectual pursuits or the means of æsthetic 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.[145] Thus, in the cases just mentioned, the lawyer contemplates the virtual purchase of his 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 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 the moral life. The economic method of true judgment is roundabout and more complex and more difficult than ethical, and involves a more express recourse to those 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 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 bread—apparently 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 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 uses 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 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.[146]

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, 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 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.[147]

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 pursued—in 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 order. Moreover, in thus defining the particular, 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 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 identified 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 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" and 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 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.[148]

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 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.[149] 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.

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.[150]

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.

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."[151] 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 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 other 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 the individual intelligence apart from the possibility of social 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 serve 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 objection 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 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? We must deny that even in the improved form the criterion of social currency is a valid 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 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.[152]

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 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[153] 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 "energetic" 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, each one, a unique set of 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 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?[154]

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 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.[155] 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 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 we 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" 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 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.[156]