II

So put, the problem suggests its own solution. It indicates, first of

all, that nature and human nature are not completely compatible, that

consequently, conclusions are being forced by nature on human nature

which human nature resents and rejects, and that traits are being

assigned to nature by human nature which nature does not possess, but

which, if possessed, would make her congenial to human needs. All this

is so platitudinous that I feel ashamed to write it; but then, how can

one avoid platitudes without avoiding truth? And truth here is the

obvious fact that since human nature is the point of existence to which

good and evil refer, what is called value has its seat necessarily in

human nature, and what is called existence has its seat necessarily in

the nature of which human nature is a part and apart. Value, in so far

forth, is a content of nature, having its roots in her conditions and

its life in her force, while the converse is not true. All nature and

all existence is not spontaneously and intrinsically a content of value.

Only that portion of it which is human is such. Humanly speaking,

non-human existences become valuable by their efficacious bearing on

humanity, by their propitious or their disastrous relations to human

consciousness. It is these relations which delimit the substance of our

goods and evils, and these, at bottom, are indistinguishable from

consciousness. They do not, need not, and cannot connect all existence

with human life. They are inevitably implicated only with those which

make human life possible at all. Of the environment, they pertain only

to that portion which is fit by the implicated conditions of life

itself. It may therefore be said that natural existence produces and

sustains some values,--at least the minimal value which is identical

with the bare existence of mankind--on its own account, but no more. The

residual environment remains--irrelevant and menacing, wider than

consciousness and independent of it. Value, hence, is a specific kind of

natural existence among other existences. To say that it is non-existent

in nature, is to say that value is not coincident and coexistent with

other existences, just as when it is said that a thing is not red, the

meaning is that red is not copresent with other qualities. Conversely,

to say that value exists in nature is to say that nature and human

nature, things and thoughts, are in some respect harmonious or

identical. Hence, what human nature tries to force upon nature must be,

by implication, non-existent in nature but actual in mind, so that the

nature of value must be held inseparable from the nature of mind.[87]

It follows that value is, in origin and character, completely

irrational. At the foundations of our existence it is relation of their

conditions and objects to our major instincts, our appetites, our

feelings, our desires, our ambitions--most clearly, to the

self-regarding instinct and the instincts of nutrition, reproduction,

and gregariousness. Concerning those, as William James writes, "Science

may come and consider their ways and find that most of them are useful.

But it is not for the sake of their utility that they are followed,

but because at the moment of following them we feel that it is the only

appropriate and natural thing to do. Not a man in a billion when taking

his dinner, ever thinks of utility. He eats because the food tastes good

and makes him want more. If you ask him why he should want to eat more

of what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philosopher,

he will probably laugh at you for a fool. The connection between

the savory sensation and the act it awakens is for him absolute and

_selbstverstaendlich_, an _a priori_ synthesis of the most perfect sort,

needing no proof but its own evidence.... To the metaphysician alone can

such questions occur as 'Why do we smile when pleased, and not scowl?

Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why

does a particular maiden turn our wits upside down?' The common man can

only say '_of course_ we smile, _of course_ our heart palpitates at the

sight of a crowd, _of course_ we love the maiden, that beautiful soul

clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made from all

eternity to be loved.' And so, probably, does each animal feel about

the particular things it tends to do in the presence of particular

objects.... To the broody hen the notion would probably seem

monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom

a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious and

never-to-be-too-much-set-upon object it is to her." In sum, fundamental

values are relations, responses, attitudes, immediate, simple,

subjectively obvious, and irrational. But everything else becomes

valuable or rational only by reference to them.

Study them or others empirically,[88] and they appear as types of

specific behavior, simple or complicated, consisting of a given motor

"set" of the organism, strong emotional tone, and aggregates of

connected ideas, more or less systematized. In the slang of the new

medical psychology which has done so much to uncover their method and

mechanism, they are called "complexes"; ethics has called them

interests, and that designation will do well enough. They are the

primary and morally ultimate efficacious units of which human nature is

compounded, and it is in terms of the world's bearing upon their destiny

that we evaluate nature and judge her significance and worth.

Now in interest, the important delimiting quality is emotional tone.

Whatever else is sharable, that is not. It is the very stuff of our

attitudes, of our acceptances and rejections of the world and its

contents, the very essence of the relations we bear to these. That these

relations shall be identical for any two human beings requires that the

two shall be identical: two persons cannot hold the same relation to the

same or different objects any more than two objects can occupy

absolutely the same space at the same time. Hence, all our differences

and disagreements. However socially-minded we may be, mere numerical

diversity compels us to act as separate centers, to value things with

reference to separate interests, to orient our worlds severally, and

with ourselves as centers. This orienting is the relating of the

environment to our interests, the establishment of our worlds of

appreciation, the creation of our orders of value. However much these

cross and interpenetrate, coincide they never can.

Our interests, furthermore, are possibly as numerous as our reflex arcs.

Each may, and most do, constitute distinct and independent valuations of

their objects, to which they respond, and each, with these objects,

remains an irreducible system. But reflex arcs and interests do not act

alone. They act like armies; they compound and are integrated, and when

so integrated their valuations fuse and constitute the more complex and

massive feelings, pleasures and pains, the emotions of anger, of fear,

of love; the sentiments of respect, of admiration, of sympathy. They

remain, through all degrees of complexity, appraisements of the

environment, reactions upon it, behavior toward it, as subject to

empirical examination by the psychologist as the environment itself by

the physicist.

With a difference, however, a fundamental difference. When you have an

emotion you cannot yourself examine it. Effectively as the mind may work

in sections, it cannot with sanity be divided against itself nor long

remain so. A feeling cannot be had and examined in the same time. And

though the investigator who studies the nature of red does not become

red, the investigator who studies the actual emotion of anger does tend

to become angry. Emotion is infectious; anger begets anger; fear, fear;

love, love; hate, hate; actions, relations, attitudes, when actual,

integrate and fuse; as feelings, they constitute the sense of behavior,

varying according to a changing and unstable equilibrium of factors

_within_ the organism; they are actually underneath the skin, and

consequently, to know them alive is to have them. On the other hand, to

know _things_ is simply to have a relation to them. The same thing may

be both loved and hated, desired or spurned, by different minds at the

same time or by the same mind at different times. One, for example,

values whiskey positively, approaches, absorbs it, aims to increase its

quantity and sale; another apprehends it negatively, turns from it,

strives to oust it from the world. Then, according to these direct and

immediate valuations of whiskey, its place in the common world of the

two minds will be determined. To save or destroy it, they may seek to

destroy each other. Even similar positive valuations of the object might

imply this mutual repugnance and destruction. Thus, rivals in love: they

enhance and glorify the same woman, but as she is not otherwise

sharable, they strive to eliminate each other. Throughout the world of

values the numerical distinctness of the seats or centers of value,

whatever their identity otherwise, keeps them ultimately inimical. They

may terminate in the common object, but they originate in different

souls and they are related to the object like two magnets of like

polarity to the same piece of iron that lies between them. Most of what

is orderly in society and in science is the outcome of the adjustment of

just such oppositions: our civilization is an unstable equilibrium of

objects, through the cooeperation, antipathy, and fusion of

value-relations.

Individuals are no better off; personality is constructed in the same

way. If, indeed, the world had been made for us, we might have been

spared this warfare to man upon earth. Life might have been the obvious

irrational flow of bliss so vividly described by William James; nature

and human nature would have been one; bridging the gulf between them

would never have been the task of the tender-minded among philosophers.

Unfortunately our mere numerical difference, the mere numerical

difference of the interests which compose our egos, makes the trouble,

so that we are compelled to devote most of our lives to converting the

different into the same. The major part of our instincts serve this

function recognizably, e.g., nutrition, and the "higher powers" do so no

less, if not so obviously. Generalization is nothing more, thinking

nothing else. It is the assimilation of many instances into one form,

law, or purpose; the preservation of established contents of value, just

as nutrition is the preservation of life by means of the conversion of

foreign matter into the form and substance of the body. By bowels and by

brain, what is necessary, what will feed the irrationally given

interest, is preserved and consumed: the rest is cast off as waste, as

irrelevance, as contradiction.

The relation may, of course, also reverse itself. Face to face with the

immovable and inexorable, the mind may accept it with due resignation,

or it may challenge its tyranny and exclude it from its world. It may

seek or create or discover a substitute that it is content to accept,

though this will in turn alter the course and character of the interest

which in such an instance defines the mind's action. Thus, a way out

for one of the lovers of the same girl might be to become a depressed

and yearning bachelor, realizing his potential sexuality in the

vicarious reproduction of reverie and sentiment; another might be to

divert the stream of his affections to another girl, reorganizing his

life about a different center and acquiring a new system of practical

values determined by this center; a third might be a complete

redirection of his sexual energies upon objects the interest in which we

would call, abnormal and anti-social in one case, and in another lofty

and spiritual. In the latter case sexuality would have been

depersonalized; it would have changed into poetic and humanitarian

passion; it would have become love as Plato means us to take the word.

But each of these processes would have been a conversion, through the

need defined by an identical instinct, of the _same into the different_;

the human nature which existed at the beginning of the change would be

deeply other than the human nature in which the change culminated. In

each case a condition thrust upon the spirit by its environment would

have occasioned the creation and maintenance of an environment demanded

by the spirit. Yet in so far as it was not truly _the same_ as that

envisaged in the primitive demand, it would still imply the tragedy of

the world not made for us and the "problem of evil," in which the life

of the spirit is persistently a salvage of one of two always

incompatible goods, a saving by surrender.

And this is all that a mind is--an affair of saving and rejecting, of

valuing with a system of objects of which a living body and its desires

and operations, its interests, are focal and the objects marginal, for

its standard. Mind, thus, is neither simple, nor immutable, nor stable;

it is a thing to be "changed," "confused," "cleared," "made-up,"

"trained." One body, I have written elsewhere,[89] "in the course of its

lifetime, has many minds, only partially united. Men are all too often

"of two minds." The unity of a mind depends on its consistent pursuit of

_one_ interest, although we then call it narrow; or on the cooeperation

and harmony of its many interests. Frequently, two or more minds may

struggle for the possession of the same body; that is, the body may be

divided by two elaborately systematized tendencies to act. The beginning

of such division occurs wherever there is a difficulty in deciding

between alternative modes of behavior; the end is to be observed in

those cases of dual or multiple personality in which the body has

ordered a great collection of objects and systematized so large a

collection of interests in such typically distinct ways as to have set

up for itself different and opposed "minds." On the other hand, two or

fifty or a million bodies may be "of the same mind."

Unhappily, difference of mind, diversity and conflict of interests is

quite as fundamental, if not more so, as sameness of mind, cooeperation

and unity of interests. This the philosophical tradition sufficiently

attests. To Plato man is at once a protean beast, a lion, and an

intellect; the last having for its proper task to rule the first and

to regulate the second, which is always rebellious and irruptive.[90]

According to the Christian tradition man is at once flesh and spirit,

eternally in conflict with one another, and the former is to be

mortified that the latter may have eternal life. Common sense divides us

into head and heart, never quite at peace with one another. There is no

need of piling up citations. Add to the inward disharmonies of mind its

incompatibilities with the environment, and you perceive at once how

completely it is, from moment to moment, a theater and its life a drama

of which the interests that compose it are at once protagonists and

directors. The catastrophe of this unceasing drama is always that one or

more of the players is driven from the stage of conscious existence. It

may be that the environment--social conditions, commercial necessity,

intellectual urgency, allies of other interests--will drive it off; it

may be that its own intrinsic unpleasantness will banish it, will put it

out of mind; whatever the cause, it is put out. Putting it out does not,

however, end the drama; putting it out serves to complicate the drama.

For the "new psychology"[91] shows that whenever an interest or a desire

or impulsion is put out of the mind, it is really, if not extirpated,

put into the mind; it is driven from the conscious level of existence to

the unconscious. It retains its force and direction, only its work now

lies underground. Its life henceforward consists partly in a direct

oppugnance to the inhibitions that keep it down, partly in burrowing

beneath and around them and seeking out unwonted channels of escape.

Since life is long, repressions accumulate, the mass of existence of

feeling and desire tends to become composed entirely of these

repressions, layer upon layer, with every interest in the aggregate

striving to attain place in the daylight of consciousness.

Now, empirically and metaphysically, no one interest is more excellent

than any other. Repressed or patent, each is, whether in a completely

favorable environment or in a completely indifferent universe, or before

the bar of an absolute justice, or under the domination of an absolute

and universal good, entitled to its free fulfilment and perfect

maintenance. Each is a form of the good; the essential content of each

is good. That any are not fulfilled, but repressed, is a fact to be

recorded, not an appearance to be explained away. And it may turn out

that the existence of the fact may explain the effort to explain it

away. For where interests are in conflict with each other or with

reality, and where the loser is not extirpated, its revenge may be just

this self-fulfilment in unreality, in idea, which philosophies of

absolute values offer it. Dreams, some of the arts, religion, and

philosophy may indeed be considered as such fulfilments, worlds of

luxuriant self-realization of all that part of our nature which the

harsh conjunctions with the environment overthrow and suppress.

Sometimes abortive self-expressions of frustrated desires, sometimes

ideal compensations for the shortcomings of existence, they are always

equally ideal reconstructions of the surrounding evil of the world into

forms of the good. And because they are compensations in idea, they are

substituted for existence, appraised as "true," and "good," and

"beautiful," and "real," while the experiences which have suppressed the

desires they realize are condemned as illusory and unreal. In them

humanity has its freest play and amplest expression.