IV

In the last analysis the ultimate motive of all reflective thought is

the progressive determination of the ends of conduct. Physical judgment,

or, in psychological terms, reflective attention to objects in the

physical world, is at every turn directed and controlled by reference to

a gradually developing purpose, so that the process may also be

described as one of bringing to fulness of definition an at first

vaguely conceived purpose through ascertainment and determination of the

means at hand. The problematic situation in which reflection takes its

rise inevitably develops in this two-sided way into consciousness of a

definite end on the one side, and of the means or conditions of

attaining it on the other.

It has been shown that there _may_ be involved in any finally

satisfactory determination of a situation an explicit reflection upon

and definition of the controlling end which is present and gives point

and direction to the physical determination. But very often such is not

the case. When a child sees a bright object at a distance and makes

toward it, availing himself more or less skilfully of such assistance as

intervening articles of furniture may afford, there is of course no

consciousness on his part of any definite purpose as such, and this is

to say that the child does not subject his conduct to criticism from the

standpoint of the value or its ends. There is simply strong desire for

the distant red ball, controlling all the child's movements for the

time being and prompting a more or less critical inspection of the

intervening territory with reference to the easiest way of crossing it.

The purpose is implicitly accepted, not explicitly determined, as a

preliminary to physical determination of the situation. If one may speak

of a development of the purpose in such a case as this, one must say

that the development into details comes through judgment of the

environing conditions. To change the illustration in order not to commit

ourselves to the ascription of too developed a faculty of judgment to

the child, this is true likewise of any process of reflective attention

in the mind of an adult in which a general purpose is accepted at the

outset and is carried through to execution without reflection upon its

ethical or economic character as a purpose. The specific purpose as

executed is certainly not the same as the general purpose with which the

reflective process took its rise. It is filled out with details, or may

perhaps even be quite different in its general outlines. There has

necessarily been development and perhaps even transformation, but our

contention is that all this has been effected in and through a process

of judgment in which the conditions of action, and not the purpose

itself, have been the immediate objects of determination. Upon these the

attention has been centered, though of course the attention was directed

to them by the purpose. To state the case in logical terms, it has been

only through selection and determination of the means and conditions of

action from the standpoint of predicates suggested by the general

purpose accepted at the outset that this purpose itself had been

rendered definite and practical and possible of execution. Probably such

cases are seldom to be found in the adult experience. As a rule, the

course of physical or technological judgment will almost always bring to

light implications involved in the accepted purpose which must

inevitably raise ethical and economic questions; and the resolution of

these latter will in turn afford new points of view for further physical

determination of the situation. In such processes the logical points of

the problem of ethical and economic valuation come clearly into view.

In our earlier account of the matter it was more convenient to use

language which implied that ethical and economic judgment must be

preceded by implicit or explicit acceptance of a definite situation

presented in sense-perception, and that these evaluating judgments could

be carried through to their goal only upon the basis of such an

inventory of fixed conditions. Thus the ultimate ethical quality of the

general purpose of building a house would seem to depend upon the

precise form which this purpose comes to assume after the actual

presence and the quality of the means of building have been ascertained

and the economic bearings of the proposed expenditure have been

considered. Surely it is a waste of effort to debate with oneself upon

the ethical rightness of a project which is physically impossible or

else out of the question from the economic point of view. We are,

however, now in a position to see that this way of looking at the matter

is both inaccurate and self-contradictory. In the actual development of

our purposes there is no such orderly and inflexible arrangement of

stages; and if it is a waste of effort to deliberate upon a purpose that

is physically impossible, it may, with still greater force, be argued

that we cannot find, and judge the fitness of, the necessary physical

means until we know what, precisely, it is that we wish to do. The truth

is that there is constant interplay and interaction between the various

phases of the inclusive judgment-process, or rather, more than this,

that there is a complete and thoroughgoing mutual implication. It is

indeed true that our ethical purposes cannot take form in a vacuum apart

from consideration of their physical and economic possibility, but it

is also true that our physical and economic problems are ultimately

meaningless and impossible, whether of statement or of solution, except

as they are interpreted as arising in the course of ethical conflict.

We have, then, to do, in the present division, with situations in which,

whether at the outset or from time to time during the course of the

reflective process, there is explicit conflict between ends of conduct.

These situations are the special province of the judgment of valuation.

Our line of argument may be briefly indicated in advance as follows:

1. The judgment of valuation, whether expressed in terms of the

individual experience or in terms of social evolution, is essentially

the process of the explicit and deliberate resolution of conflict

between ends. As an incidental, though nearly always indispensable, step

to the final resolution of such conflict, physical judgment, or, in

general, the judgment of fact or existence, plays its part, this part

being to define the situation in terms of the means necessary for the

execution of the end that is gradually taking form. The two modes of

judgment mutually incite and control each other, and neither could

continue to any useful purpose without this incitement and control of

the other. Both modes of judgment are objective in content and

significance. At the end of the reflective process and immediately upon

the verge of execution of the end or purpose which has taken form the

result may be stated or apprehended in either of two ways: (1) directly,

in terms of the end, and (2) indirectly, in terms of the ordered system

of existent means which have been discovered, determined, and arranged.

If such final survey of the result be taken by way of preparation for

action, or for whatever reason, the end will be apprehended as

possessing ethical value and the means, under conditions later to be

specified, as possessing economic value.

2. What then is the nature and source of this apprehension of end or

means as valuable? The consciousness of end or means as valuable is an

emotional consciousness expressive of the agent's practical attitude as

determined in the just completed judgment of ethical or economic

valuation and arising in consequence of the inhibition placed upon the

activities which constitute the attitude by the effort of apprehending

or imaging the valued object. Ethical and economic value are thus

strictly correlative; psychologically they are emotional incidents of

apprehending in the two respective ways just indicated the same total

result of the inclusive complex judgment-process. Finally, as the moment

of action comes on, the consciousness of the ethically valued end lapses

first; then the consciousness of economic value is lost in a purely

"physical," _i. e._, technological, consciousness of the means and their

properties and interrelations in the ordered system which has been

arranged; and this finally merges into the immediate and

undifferentiated consciousness of activity as use of the means becomes

sure and unhesitating.

When we say that the ends which oppose each other in an ethical

situation (that is, a situation for the time being seen in an ethical

aspect) are related, and the ends in an economic situation are not, we

by no means wish to imply that in the one case we have in this fact of

relatedness a satisfactory solution at hand which is wanting in the

other. To feel, for example, that there is a direct and inherent

relationship between a cherished purpose of self-culture and an ideal of

social service which seems now to require the abandonment of the purpose

does not mean that one yet knows just _how_ the two ends should be

related in his life henceforth; and again, to say that one can see no

inherent relation between a desire for books and pictures and the need

of food, excepting in so far as both ends depend for their realization

upon a limited supply of means, is not to say that the issue of the

conflict is not of ethical significance. Such a view as we here reject

would amount to a denial of the possibility of genuinely problematic

ethical situations[126] and would accord with the opinion that economic

judgment as such lies apart from the sphere of ethics and is at most

subject only to occasional revision and control in the light of ethical

considerations.

By the relatedness of the ends in a situation we mean the fact, more or

less explicitly recognized by the agent, that the new, and as yet

undefined, purpose which has arisen belongs in the same system with the

end, or group of ends, which the standard inhibiting immediate action

represents. The standard inhibits action in obedience to the impulse

that has come to consciousness, and the image of the new end is, on its

part, definite and impressive enough to inhibit action in obedience to

the standard. The relatedness of the two factors is shown in a practical

way by the fact that, in the first instance at least, they are tacitly

expected to work out their own adjustment. By the process already

described in outline, subject and predicate begin to develop and thereby

to approach each other, and a provisional or partial solution of the

problem may thus be reached without resort to any other method than that

of direct comparison and adjustment of the ends involved on either side.

The standard which has been called in question has enough of congruence

with the new imaged purpose to admit of at least some progress toward a

solution through this method.

We can best come to an understanding of this recognition of the

relatedness of the ends in ethical valuation by pausing to examine

somewhat carefully into the conditions involved in the acceptance or

reflective acknowledgment of a defined end of conduct as being one's

own. Any new end in coming to consciousness encounters some more or

less firmly established habit represented in consciousness by a sign or

symbolic image of some sort, the habit being itself the outcome of past

judgment-process. Our present problem is the significance of the agent's

recognition of a relatedness between his new impulsive end and the end

which represents the habit, and we shall best approach its solution by

considering the various factors and conditions involved in the agent's

conscious recognition of the established end as being such.

In any determinate end there is inevitably implied a number of groups of

factual judgments in which are presented the objective conditions under

which execution of the end or purpose must take place. There is in the

first place a general view of environing conditions, physical and

social, presented in a group of judgments (1) descriptive of the means

at hand, of the topography of the region in which the purpose is to be

carried out, of climatic conditions, and the like, and (2) descriptive

of the habits of thought and feeling of the people with whom one is to

deal, their prejudices, their tastes, and their institutions. The

project decided on may, let us say, be an individual or a national

enterprise, whether philanthropic or commercial, which is to be launched

in a distant country peopled by partly civilized races. In addition to

these groups of judgments upon the physical and sociological conditions

under which the work must proceed, there will also be a more or less

adequate and impartial knowledge of one's own physical and mental

fitness for the enterprise, since the work as projected may promise to

tax one's physical powers severely and to require, for its successful

conduct, large measure of industry, devotion, patience, and wisdom.

Indeed any determinate purpose whatever inevitably implies a more or

less varied and comprehensive inventory of conditions. Further

illustration is not necessary for our present purpose. We may say that

in a general way the conditions relevant to a practical purpose will

group themselves naturally under four heads of classification, as

physical, sociological, physiological, and psychological. All four

classes are objective, though the last two embrace conditions peculiar

to the agent as an individual over against the environment to which for

purposes of his present activity he stands in a sense opposed.

Now our present interest is not so much in the enumeration and

classification of possible relevant conditions in a typical situation as

in the significance of these relevant conditions in the agent's

apprehension of them. Perhaps this significance cannot better be

described than by saying that essentially and impressively the

conditions are apprehended as, taken together, _warranting_ the purpose

that has been determined. We appeal, in support of this account of the

matter, to an impartial introspection of the way in which the means and

conditions of action stand related to the formed purpose in the moment

of survey of a situation. The various details presented in the survey of

a situation are apprehended, not as bare facts such as one might find

set down in a scientist's notebook, but as warranting--as closely,

uniquely, and vitally relevant to--the action that is about to be taken.

This, as we believe, is a fair account of the situation in even the

commoner and simpler emergencies that confront the ordinary man. Quite

conspicuously is it true of cases in which the purpose is a purely

technological one that has been worked out with considerable difficulty

and is therefore not executed until after a somewhat careful survey of

conditions has been taken. It is often true likewise in cases of express

ethical judgment; if the ethical phases of the reflective process have

not been excessively long and difficult, our definite sense of the

ethical value of the act we are about to do lapses quite easily, and the

factual aspects and features of the situation as given in one or more of

the four classes which we have distinguished take on an access of

significance in their character of warranting, confirming, or even

compelling the act determined upon. Of our ordinary sense-perception in

the moments of its actual functioning no less than of conscience in its

aspect of a moral perceptive faculty are the words of Bishop Butler

sensibly true that "to preside and govern, from the very economy and

constitution of man, belongs to it."[127] I Even in cases of more

serious moral difficulty this sanctioning aspect of the means and

conditions of action is not overshadowed. If the situation is one in

which by reason of their complexity these play a conspicuous rôle and

must be surveyed, by way of preparation on the agents' part, for

performance of the act, they inevitably assume, for the agent, their

proper functional character. In general, the conditions presented in the

system of factual judgments have a certain "rightful authority" which

they seem to lend to the purpose or end with reference to which they

were worked out to their present degree of factual detail. The

conditions can thus seem to sanction the end because conditions and end

have been worked out together. Gradual development on the one side

prompts analytical inquiry upon the other and is in turn directed and

advanced by the results of this inquiry. In the end the result may be

read off either in terms of end or in terms of conditions and

means.[128] The two readings must be in accord and the agent's

apprehension of the conditions as warrant for the end is expression in

consciousness of this "agreement."[129]

Now in this mode of apprehension of factual conditions there is a highly

important logical implication--an implication which inevitably comes

more and more clearly into view with the continued exercise of judgment,

even though the agent's habit of interest in the scrutiny of perplexing

situations may still remain, by reason of the want of trained capacity

for a broader view, limited in its range quite strictly to the physical

sphere. This implication is, we shall declare at once, that of an

endeavoring, striving, active principle or self which can be helped or

hindered in its unfolding by particular purposes and sets of

corresponding conditions--can lose or gain, through devotion to

particular purposes, in the breadth, fulness, and energy of its life.

The agent's apprehension of and reference to this active principle of

course varies in all degrees of explicitness, according to

circumstances, from the vague awareness that is present in a simple case

of physical judgment to the clear recognition and endeavor at definition

that are characteristic of serious ethical crises.

That the situation should develop and bring to light this factor is what

should be expected on general grounds of logic--for to say that a set of

conditions warrants or sanctions or confirms a given purpose implies

that our purposes can stand in need of warrant, and this would seem to

be impossible apart from reference to a process whose maintenance and

development in and through our purposes are assumed as being as a matter

of course desirable. It is of the essence of our contention that the

apprehension of the conditions of action as _warranting the end_ is a

primordial and necessary feature of the situation--indeed, its

constitutive feature. If our concern were with the psychological

development of self-consciousness as a phase of reflective experience,

we should endeavor to show that this development is mediated in the

first instance by the "subjective" phenomena of feeling, emotion, and

desire which find their place _in the course_ of the judgment-process.

We should then hold that, with the _conclusion_ of the judgment-process

and the accompanying sense of the known conditions as reassuring and

confirmatory of the end, comes the earliest possibility of a

discriminative recognition of the self as having been all along a

necessary factor in the process. We should hold that outside of the

_process_ of reflective attention there can be no psychical or

"elementary" _beginnings_ of self-consciousness, and then that, except

as a development out of the experience to which we have referred as

marking the _conclusion_ of the attentive process, there can be no

recognized specific and in any degree definable consciousness of self.

All this, however, lies rather beside our present purpose. We wish

simply to insist that it is out of the apprehension of conditions as

reassuring and confirmatory, out of this "primordial germ," that the

agent's definite recognition of himself as a center of development and

expenditure of energy takes its rise. Here are the beginnings of the

possibility of self-conscious ethical and economic valuation.

This apprehension of the means as _warranting_ is, we have held, a fact

even when the means surveyed are wholly of the physical sort, and we

have thereby implied that consciousness of the self as "energetic" may

take its rise in situations of this type or during the physical stage in

the development of a more complex total situation. It would be an

interesting speculation to consider to what extent and in what way the

development of the sciences of sociology and physiology may have been

essentially facilitated by the emergence of this form of

self-consciousness. But however the case may stand with these sciences

or with the rise of real interest in them in the mind of a given

individual, interest in the objective psychological conditions of a

contemplated act is certainly very closely dependent upon interest in

that subjective self which one has learned to know through the past

exercise of judgment in definition and contemplation of conditions of

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]

We may now interpret, in the light of our general view of the function

of factual judgment, the concept of the "empirical self" referred to in

our discussion of the various types of sanctioning condition which may

enter into the "final survey." The "empirical self" of psychological

science is a construction gradually put together by psychologist or

introspective layman as an interpretation of the way in which accepted

concrete modes of conduct, in the determination of which standards have

been operative, have worked out in practice to the furtherance or

impoverishment of the "energetic" self. We have seen that the ambiguous

presented self which functions in the moral attitude of obedience to

authority or to conscience gives place in the attitude of conscious

valuation to apprehension of the "energetic" self, on the one hand, and

descriptive concepts of particular types of conduct, on the other. The

"empirical self" at the same time makes its appearance as a constantly

expanding inventory of the "spiritual resources" which the "energetic"

self has at its disposal. These are the functions of the soul which a

functional psychology shows us in operation--powers of attention,

strength of memory, fertility in associative recall, and the like--and

these are the resources wherewith the "energetic" self may execute, and

so exploit to its own furtherance, the purposes which, in particular

emergencies, new end and recognized standards may work out in

co-operation.[157]