act I think we might still speak of it as right or wrong. In trying to

judge a proposed act we doubtless try to discover what it will mean, that is, we look at consequences. But these consequences are looked upon as giving us the meaning of the present act and we do not on this account subordinate the present act to these consequences. Especially we do not mean to eliminate the significance of this very process of judgment. It is significant that in considering what are the intrinsic goods Moore enumerates personal affection and the appreciation of beauty, and with less positiveness, true belief, but does not include any mention of the valuing or choosing or creative consciousness.

(4) If we regard right as the concept which reflects the judgment of standardizing our acts by some ideal order, questions arise as to the objectivity of this order and the fixed or moving character of the implied standard. Rashdall lays great stress upon the importance of objectivity: "Assuredly there is no scientific problem upon which so much depends as upon the answer we give to the question whether the distinction which we are accustomed to draw between right and wrong belongs to the region of objective truth like the laws of mathematics and of physical science, or whether it is based upon an actual emotional constitution of individual human beings."[73] The appraisement of the various desires and impulses by myself and other men is "a piece of insight into the true nature of things."[74] While these statements are primarily intended to oppose the moral sense view of the judgment, they also bear upon the question whether right is something fixed. The phrase "insight into the true nature of things" suggests at once the view that the nature of things is quite independent of any attitude of human beings toward it. It is something which the seeker for moral truth may discover but nothing which he can in any way modify. It is urged that if we are to have any science of ethics at all what was once right must be conceived as always right in the same circumstances.[75]

I hold no brief for the position--if any one holds the position--that in saying "this is right" I am making an assertion about my own feelings or those of any one else. As already stated the function of the judging process is to determine objects, with reference to which we say "is" or "is not." The emotional theory of the moral consciousness does not give adequate recognition to this. But just as little as the process of the moral consciousness is satisfied by an emotional theory of the judgment does it sanction any conception of objectivity which requires that values are here or there once for all; that they are fixed entities or "a nature of things" upon which the moral consciousness may look for its information but upon which it exercises no influence. The process of attempting to give--or discover--moral values is a process of mutual determination of object and agent. We have to do in morals not with a nature of things but with natures of persons. The very characteristic of a person as we have understood it is that he is synthetic, is actually creating something new by organizing experiences and purposes, by judging and choosing. Objectivity does not necessarily imply changelessness.

Whether right is a term of fixed and changeless character depends upon whether the agents are fixed units, either in fact or in ideal. If, as we maintain, right is the correlate of a self confronting a world of other persons conceived as all related in an order, the vital question is whether this order is a fixed or a moving order. "Straight" is a term of fixed content just because we conceive space in timeless terms; it is by its very meaning a cross-section of a static order. But a world of living intelligent agents in social relations is in its very presuppositions a world of activity, of mutual understanding and adjustment. Rationalistic theory, led astray by geometrical conceptions, conceived that a universal criterion must be like a straight line, a fixed and timeless--or eternal--entity. But in such an order of fixed units there could be no selection, no adjustment to other changing agents, no adventure upon the new untested possibility which marks the advance of every great moral idea, in a word, no morality of the positive and constructive sort. And if it be objected that the predicate of a judgment must be timeless whatever the subject, that the word "is" as Plato insists cannot be used if all flows, we reply that if right=the correlate of a moving order, of living social intelligent beings, it is quite possible to affirm "This is according to that law." If our logic provides no form of judgment for the analysis of such a situation it is inadequate for the facts which it would interpret. But in truth mankind's moral judgments have never committed themselves to any such implication. We recognize the futility of attempting to answer simply any such questions as whether the Israelites did right to conquer Canaan or Hamlet to avenge his father.

(5) The category of right has usually been closely connected, if not identified, with reason or "cognitive" activity as contrasted with emotion. Professor Dewey on the contrary has pointed out clearly[76] the impossibility of separating emotion and thought. "To put ourselves in the place of another ... is the surest way to attain universality and objectivity of moral knowledge." "The only truly general, the reasonable as distinct from the merely shrewd or clever thought, is the _generous_ thought." But in the case of certain judgments such as those approving fairness and the general good Sidgwick finds a rational intuition. "The principle of impartiality is obtained by considering the similarity of the individuals that make up a Logical Whole or Genus."[77] Rashdall challenges any but a rationalistic ethics to explain fairness as contrasted with partiality of affection.

There is without question a properly rational or intellectual element in the judgment of impartiality, namely, analysis of the situation and comparison of the units. But what we shall set up as our units--whether we shall treat the gentile or the barbarian or negro as a person, as end and not merely means, or not, depends on something quite other than reason. And this other factor is not covered by the term "practical reason." In fact no ethical principle shows better the subtle blending of the emotional and social factors with the rational. For the student of the history of justice is aware that only an extraordinarily ingenious exegesis could regard justice as having ever been governed by a mathematical logic. The logic of justice has been the logic of a we-group gradually expanding its area. Or it has been the logic of a Magna Charta--a document of special privileges wrested from a superior by a strong group, and gradually widening its benefits with the admission of others into the favored class. Or it has been the logic of class, in which those of the same level are treated alike but those of different levels of birth or wealth are treated proportionately. Yet it would seem far-fetched to maintain that the countrymen of Euclid and Aristotle were deficient in the ability to perform so simple a reasoning process as the judgment one equals one, or that men who developed the Roman Law, or built the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, were similarly lacking in elementary analysis. Inequality rather than equality has been the rule in the world's justice. It has not only been the practice but the approved principle. It still is in regard to great areas of life. In the United States there is no general disapproval of the great inequalities in opportunity for children, to say nothing of inequalities in distribution of wealth. In England higher education is for the classes rather than for the masses. In Prussia the inequality in voting strength of different groups and the practical immunity of the military class from the constraints of civil law seem to an American unfair. The western states of the Union think it unfair to restrict the suffrage to males and give women no voice in the determination of matters of such vital interest to them as the law of divorce, the guardianship of children, the regulation of women's labor, the sale of alcoholic liquors, the protection of milk and food supply. Are all these differences of practice and conviction due to the fact that some people use reason while others do not? Of course in every case excellent reasons can be given for the inequality. The gentile should not be treated as a Jew because he is not a Jew. The slave should not be treated as a free citizen because he is not a free citizen. The churl should not have the same wergeld as the thane because he is lowborn. The more able should possess more goods. The woman should not vote because she is not a man. The reasoning is clear and unimpeachable if you accept the premises, but what gives the premises? In every case cited the premise is determined largely if not exclusively by social or emotional factors. If reason can then prescribe equally well that the slave should be given rights because he is a man of similar traits or denied rights because he has different traits from his master, if the Jew may either be given his place of equality because he hath eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, or denied equality because he differs in descent, if a woman is equal as regards taxpaying but unequal as regards voting, it is at least evident that reason is no unambiguous source of morality. The devil can quote Scripture and it is a very poor reasoner who cannot find a reason for anything that he wishes to do. A partiality that is more or less consistently partial to certain sets or classes is perhaps as near impartiality as man has yet come, whether by a rational faculty or any other.

Is it, then, the intent of this argument merely to reiterate that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions? On the contrary, the intent is to substitute for such blanket words as reason and passions a more adequate analysis. And what difference will this make? As regards the particular point in controversy it will make this difference: the rationalist having smuggled in under the cover of reason the whole moral consciousness then proceeds to assume that because two and two are always four, or the relations of a straight line are timeless, therefore ethics is similarly a matter of fixed standards and timeless goods. A legal friend told me that he once spent a year trying to decide whether a corporation was or was not a person and then concluded that the question was immaterial. But when the supreme court decided that a corporation was a person in the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment it thereby made the corporation heir to the rights established primarily for the negro. Can the moral consciousness by taking the name "reason" become heir to all the privileges of the absolute idea and to the timelessness of space and number?

Suppose I am to divide an apple between my two children--two children, two pieces--this is an analysis of the situation which is obvious and may well be called the analytic activity of reason. But shall I give to each an equal share on the ground that both are equally my children or shall I reason that as John is older or larger or hungrier or mentally keener or more generous or is a male, he shall have a larger piece than Jane? To settle this it may be said that we ought to see whether there is any connection between the size of the piece and the particular quality of John which is considered, or that by a somewhat different use of reason we should look at the whole situation and see how we shall best promote family harmony and mutual affection. To settle the first of these problems, that of the connection between the size of the piece and the size of the hunger or the sex of the child, is seemingly again a question of analysis, of finding identical units, but a moment's thought shows that the case is not so simple; that the larger child should have the larger piece is by no means self-evident. This is in principle doubtless the logic, to him that hath shall be given. It is the logic of the survival of the strong, but over against that the moral consciousness has always set another logic which says that the smaller child should have the larger piece if thereby intelligent sympathy can contribute toward evening up the lot of the smaller. Now it is precisely this attitude of the moral consciousness which is not suggested by the term reason, for it is quite different from the analytic and identifying activity. This analytical and identifying activity may very well rule out of court the hypothesis that I should give John the larger piece because he has already eaten too much or because he has just found a penny or because he has red hair; it has undoubtedly helped in abolishing such practices as that of testing innocence by the ordeal. But before the crucial question of justice which divides modern society, namely, whether we shall lay emphasis upon adjustment of rewards to previous abilities, habits, possessions, character, or shall lay stress upon needs, and the possibility of bringing about a greater measure of equality, the doctrine which would find its standard in an _a priori_ reason is helpless.

If we look at the second test suggested, namely, that of considering the situation as a whole with a view to the harmony of the children and the mutual affection within the family, there can be even less question that this is no mere logical problem of the individuals in a logical genus. It is the social problem of individuals who have feelings and emotions as well as thought and will. The problem of distributing the apple fairly is then a complex in which at least the following processes enter. (1) Analysis of the situation to show all the relevant factors with the full bearing of each; (2) putting yourself in the place of each one to be considered and experiencing to the full the claims, the difficulties and the purposes of each person involved; (3) considering all of these _as_ members of the situation so that no individual is given rights or allowed claims except in so far as he represents a point of view which is comprehensive and sympathetic. This I take it is the force of President Wilson's utterance which has commanded such wide acceptance: "America asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask in the name of humanity." Kant aimed to express a high and democratic ideal of justice in his doctrine that we should treat every rational being as end. The defect in his statement is that the rational process as such has never treated and so far as can be foreseen never will treat _human_ beings as ends. To treat a human being as an end it is necessary to put oneself into his place in his whole nature and not simply in his universalizing, and legislative aspects: Kant's principle is profound and noble, but his label for it is misleading and leaves a door open for appalling disregard of other people's feelings, sympathies, and moral sentiments, as Professor Dewey has indicated in his recent lectures on "German Philosophy and Politics."

The term "reasonable," which is frequently used in law and common life as a criterion of right, seems to imply that reason is a standard. As already stated, common life understands by the reasonable man one who not only uses his own thinking powers but is willing to listen to reason as presented by some one else. He makes allowance for frailties in human nature. To be reasonable means, very nearly, taking into account all factors of the case not only as I see them but as men of varying capacities and interests regard them. The type of the "unreasonable" employer is the man who refuses to talk over things with the laborers; to put himself in their place; or to look at matters from the point of view of society as a whole.

Just as little does the term reasonable as used in law permit a purely intellectualistic view of the process or an _a priori_ standard. The question as to what is reasonable care or a reasonable price is often declared to be a matter not for the court but for the jury to decide, i.e., it is not to be deduced from any settled principle but is a question of what the average thoughtful man, who considers other people as well as himself, would do under the circumstances. A glance at some of the judicial definitions of such phrases as "reasonable care," "reasonable doubt," "reasonable law," as brought together in _Words and Phrases Judicially Defined_, illustrates this view. We get a picture not of any definite standard but of such a process as we have described in our analysis, namely, a process into which the existing social tradition, the mutual adjustments of a changing society and the intelligent consideration of all facts, enter. The courts have variously defined the reasonable (1) as the customary, or ordinary, or legal, or (2) as according with the existing state of knowledge in some special field, or (3) as proceeding on due consideration of all the facts, or (4) as offering sufficient basis for action. For example, (1) reasonable care means "according to the usages, habits, and ordinary risks of the business," (2) "surgeons should keep up with the latest advances in medical science," (3) a reasonable price "is such a price as the jury would under all the circumstances decide to be reasonable." "If, after an impartial comparison and consideration the jury can say candidly they are not satisfied with the defendant's guilt they have a reasonable doubt." Under (4) falls one of various definitions of "beyond reasonable doubt." "The evidence must be such as to produce in the minds of prudent men such certainty that they would act without hesitation in their own most important affairs." There is evidently ground for the statement of one judge that "reasonable" (he was speaking the phrase "reasonable care," but his words would seem to apply to other cases) "cannot be measured by any fixed or inflexible standard." Professor Freund characterizes "reasonable" as "the negation of precision." In the development of judicial interpretation as applied to the Sherman Law the tendency is to hold that the "rule of reason" will regard as forbidden by the statute (_a_) such combinations as have historically been prohibited and (_b_) such as seem to work some definite injury.

III

The above view of the function of intelligence, and of the synthetic character of the conscious process may be further defined in certain aspects by comparison with the view of Professor Fite, who likewise develops the significance of consciousness and particularly of intelligence for our ethical concepts and social program.

Professor Fite insists that in contrast with the "functional psychology" which would make consciousness merely a means to the preservation of the organic individual in mechanical working order, the whole value of life from the standpoint of the conscious agent consists in its being conscious. Creative moments in which there is complete conscious control of materials and technique represent high and unique individuality. Extension of range of consciousness makes the agent "a larger and more inclusive being," for he is living in the future and past as well as in the present. Consciousness means that a new and original force is inserted into the economy of the social and the physical world."[78] On the basis of the importance of consciousness Professor Fite would ground his justification of rights, his conception of justice, and his social program. The individual derives his rights simply from the fact that he knows what he is doing, hence as individuals differ in intelligence they differ in rights. The problem of justice is that of according to each a degree of recognition proportioned to his intelligence, that is, treat others as ends so far as they are intelligent; so far as they are ignorant treat them as means.[79] "The conscious individual when dealing with other conscious individuals will take account of their aims, as of other factors in his situation. This will involve 'adjustment,' but not abandonment of ends, i.e., self-sacrifice. Obligation to consider these ends of others is based on 'the same logic that binds me to get out of the way of an approaching train.'"[80]

The point in which the conception of rights and justice and the implied social program advocated in this paper differs as I view it from that of Professor Fite is briefly this. I regard both the individual and his rights as essentially synthetic and in constant process of reconstruction. Therefore what is due to any individual at a moment is not measured by his present stage of consciousness. It is measured rather by his possibilities than his actualities. This does not mean that the actual is to be ignored, but it does mean that if we take our stand upon the actual we are committed to a program with little place for imagination, with an emphasis all on the side of giving people what they deserve rather than of making them capable of deserving more. Professor Fite's position I regard as conceiving consciousness itself too largely in the category of the identical and the static rather than in the more "conscious" categories of constant reconstruction. When by virtue of consciousness you conceive new ends in addition to your former particular ideas of present good the problem is, he says, "to secure perfect fulfilment of each of them." The "usefulness" or "advantage" or "profitableness" of entering into social relations is the central category for measuring their value and their obligation.

Now the conception of securing perfect fulfilment of all one's aims by means of society rather than of putting one's own aims into the process for reciprocal modification and adjustment with the aims of others and of the new social whole involves a view of these ends as fixed, an essentially mechanical view. The same is the implication in considering society from the point of view of use and profit. As previously suggested these economic terms apply appropriately to things rather than to intrinsic values. To consider the uses of a fellow-being is to measure him in terms of some other end than his own intrinsic personal worth. To consider family life or society as profitable implies in ordinary language that such life is a means for securing ends already established rather than that it _proves_ a good to the man who invests in it and thereby becomes himself a new individual with a new standard of values. Any object to be chosen must of course have value to the chooser. But it is one thing to be valued because it appeals to the actual chooser as already constituted; it is another thing to be valued because it appeals to a moving self which adventures upon this new unproved objective. This second is the distinction of taking an interest instead of being interested.

The second point of divergence is that Professor Fite lays greater stress upon the intellectual side of intelligence, whereas I should deny that the intellectual activity in itself is adequate to give either a basis for obligation or a method of dealing with the social problem. The primary fact, as Professor Fite well states it, is "that men are conscious beings and therefore know themselves and one another." It involves "a mutual recognition of personal ends." "That very knowledge which shows the individual himself shows him also that he is living in a world with other persons and other things whose mode of behavior and whose interests determine for him the conditions through which his own interests are to be realized."

What kind of "knowledge" is it "which shows the individual himself"? Professor Fite has two quite different ways of referring to this. He uses one set of terms when he would contrast his view with the sentimental, or the "Oriental," or justify exploitation by those who know better what they are about than the exploited. He uses another set of terms to characterize it when he wishes to commend his view as human, and fraternal, and as affording the only firm basis for social reform. In the first case he speaks of "mere knowing"; of intelligence as "clear," and "far-sighted," of higher degrees of consciousness as simply "more in one." "Our test of intelligence would be breadth of vision (in a coherent view), fineness and keenness of insight."[81]

In the second case it is "generous," it will show an "intelligent sympathy"; it seeks "fellowship," and would not "elect to live in a social environment in which the distinction of 'inferiors' were an essential part of the idea."[82] The type of intelligence is found not in the man seeking wealth or power, nor in the legal acumen which forecasts all discoverable consequences and devises means to carry out purposes, but in literature and art.[83]

The terms which cover both these meanings are the words "consider" and "considerate." "Breadth of consideration" gives the basis for rights. The selfish man is the "inconsiderate."[84] This term plays the part of the _amor intellectualis_ in the system of Spinoza, which enables him at once to discard all emotion and yet to keep it. For "consideration" is used in common life, and defined in the dictionaries, as meaning both "examination," "careful thought," and "appreciative or sympathetic regard." The ambiguity in the term may well have served to disguise from the author himself the double role which intelligence is made to play. The broader use is the only one that does justice to the moral consciousness, but we cannot include sympathy and still maintain that "mere knowing" covers the whole. The insistence at times upon the "mere knowing" is a mechanical element which needs to be removed before the ethical implications can be accepted.

Once more, how does one know himself and others? Is it the same process precisely as knowing a mechanical object? Thoughts without percepts are empty, and what are the "percepts" in the two cases? In the first case, that of knowing things, the percepts are colors, sounds, resistances; in the case of persons the percepts are impulses, feelings, desires, passions, as well as images, purposes, and the reflective process itself. In the former case we construct objects dehumanized; in the latter we keep them more or less concrete. But now, just as primitive man did not so thoroughly de-personalize nature, but left in it an element of personal aim, so science may view human beings as objects whose purposes and even feelings may be predicted, and hence may, as Professor Fite well puts it, view them mechanically. What he fails to note is that just this mechanical point of view is the view of "mere knowing"--if "mere" has any significance at all, it is meant to shut out "sentiment." And this mechanical view is entirely equal to the adjectives of "clear," "far-sighted," and even "broad" so far as this means "more in one." For it is not essential to a mechanical point of view that we consider men in masses or study them by statistics. I may calculate the purposes and actions, yes, and the emotions and values of one, or of a thousand, and be increasingly clear, and far-sighted, and broad, but if it is "mere" knowing--scientific information--it is still "mechanical," i.e., external. On the other hand, if it is to be a knowledge that has the qualities of humaneness, or "intelligent sympathy," it must have some of the stuff of feeling, even as in the realm of things an artist's forest will differ from that of the most "far-sighted," "clear," and "broad" statistician, by being rich with color and moving line.

And this leads to a statement of the way in which my fellow-beings will find place in "my" self. I grant that if they are there I shall take some account of them. But they may be there in all sorts of ways. They may be there as "population" if I am a statistician, or as "consumers," or as rivals, or as enemies, or as fellows, or as friends. They will have a "value" in each case, but it will sometimes be a positive value, and sometimes a negative value. Which it will be, and how great it will be, depends not on the mere fact of these objects being "in consciousness" but on the capacity in which they are there. And this capacity depends on the dominant interest and not on mere knowing. The trouble with the selfish man, says Professor Fite, is that he "fails to consider," "he fails to take account of me."[85] Well, then, _why_ does he fail? _Why_ does he not take account of me? He probably does "consider" me in several of the ways that are possible and in the ways that it suits him to consider me. I call him selfish because he does not consider me in the one particular way in which I wish to be considered. And what will get me into his consideration from this point of view? In some cases it may be that I can speak: "Sir, you are standing on my toe," and as the message encounters no obstacle in any fixed purpose or temperamental bent the idea has no difficulty in penetrating his mind. In other cases it may interfere with his desire to raise himself as high as possible, but I may convince him by the same logic as that of an "approaching railway train"--that he must regard me. In still other cases--and it is these that always test Individualism--I am not myself aware of the injury, or I am too faint to protest. How shall those who have no voice to speak get "consideration"? Only by "intelligent sympathy," and by just those emotions rooted in instinctive social tendencies which an intellectualistic Individualism excludes or distrusts.

IV

What practical conclusion, if any, follows from this interpretation of the moral consciousness and its categories? Moral progress involves both the formation of better ideals and the adoption of such ideals as actual standards and guides of life. If our view is correct we can construct better ideals neither by logical deduction nor solely by insight into the nature of things--if by this we mean things as they are. We must rather take as our starting-point the conviction that moral life is a process involving physical life, social intercourse, measuring and constructive intelligence. We shall endeavor to further each of these factors with the conviction that thus we are most likely to reconstruct our standards and find a fuller good.[86]

Physical life, which has often been depreciated from the moral point of view, is not indeed by itself supreme, but it is certain that much evil charged to a bad will is due to morbid or defective conditions of the physical organism. One would be ashamed to write such a truism were it not that our juvenile courts and our prison investigations show how far we are from having sensed it in the past. And our present labor conditions show how far our organization of industry is from any decent provision for a healthy, sound, vigorous life of all the people. This war is shocking in its destruction, but it is doubtful if it can do the harm to Great Britain that her factory system has done. And if life is in one respect less than ideals, in another respect it is greater; for it provides the possibility not only of carrying out existing ideals but of the birth of new and higher ideals.

Social interaction likewise has been much discussed but is still very inadequately realized. The great possibilities of cooeperation have long been utilized in war. With the factory and commercial organization of the past century we have hints of their economic power. Our schools, books, newspapers, are removing some of the barriers. But how far different social classes are from any knowledge, not to say appreciation, of each other! How far different races are apart! How easy to inculcate national hatred and distrust! The fourth great problem which baffles Wells's hero in the _Research Magnificent_ is yet far from solution. The great danger to morality in America lies not in any theory as to the subjectivity of the moral judgment, but in the conflict of classes and races.

Intelligence and reason are in certain respects advancing. The social sciences are finding tools and methods. We are learning to think of much of our moral inertia, our waste of life, our narrowness, our muddling and blundering in social arrangements, as stupid--we do not like to be called stupid even if we scorn the imputation of claiming to be "good." But we do not organize peace as effectively as war. We shrink before the thought of expending for scientific investigation sums comparable with those used for military purposes. And is scholarship entitled to shift the blame entirely upon other interests? Perhaps if it conceived its tasks in greater terms and addressed itself to them more energetically it would find greater support.

And finally the process of judgment and appraisal, of examination and revaluation. To judge for the sake of judging, to analyze and evaluate for the sake of the process hardly seems worth while. But if we supply the process with the new factors of increased life, physical, social, intelligent, we shall be compelled to new valuations. Such has been the course of moral development; we may expect this to be repeated. The great war and the changes that emerge ought to set new tasks for ethical students. As medievalism, the century of enlightenment, and the century of industrial revolution, each had its ethics, so the century that follows ought to have its ethics, roused by the problem of dealing fundamentally with economic, social, racial, and national relations, and using the resources of better scientific method than belonged to the ethical systems which served well their time.

Only wilful misinterpretation will suppose that the method here set forth is that of taking every want or desire as itself a final justification, or of making morality a matter of arbitrary caprice. But some may in all sincerity raise the question: "Is morality then after all simply the shifting mores of groups stumbling forward--or backward, or sidewise--with no fixed standards of right and good? If this is so how can we have any confidence in our present judgments, to say nothing of calling others to an account or of reasoning with them?" What we have aimed to present as a moral method is essentially this: to take into our reckoning all the factors in the situation, to take into account the other persons involved, to put ourselves into their places by sympathy as well as conceptually, to face collisions and difficulties not merely in terms of fixed concepts of what is good or fair, and what the right of each party concerned may be, but with the conviction that we need new definitions of the ideal life, and of the social order, and thus reciprocally of personality. Thus harmonized, free, and responsible, life may well find new meaning also in the older intrinsic goods of friendship, aesthetic appreciation and true belief. And it is not likely to omit the satisfaction in actively constructing new ideals and working for their fulfilment.

Frankly, if we do not accept this method what remains? Can any one by pure reason discover a single forward step in the treatment of the social situation or a single new value in the moral ideal? Can any analysis of the pure concept of right and good teach us anything? In the last analysis the moral judgment is not analytic but synthetic. The moral life is not natural but spiritual. And spirit is creative.

VALUE AND EXISTENCE IN PHILOSOPHY, ART, AND RELIGION

HORACE M. KALLEN

He who assiduously compares the profound and the commonplace will find their difference to turn merely on the manner of their expression; a profundity is a commonplace formulated in strange or otherwise obscure and unintelligible terms. This must be my excuse for beginning with the trite remark that the world we live in is not one which was made for us, but one in which we happened and grew. I am much aware that there exists a large and influential class of persons who do not think so; and I offer this remark with all deference to devotees of idealism, and to other such pietists who persist in arguing that the trouble which we do encounter in this vale of tears springs from the inwardness of our own natures and not from that of the world. I wish, indeed, that I could agree with them, but unhappily their very arguments prevent me, since, if the world were actually as they think it, they could not think it as they do. In fact, they could not think. Thinking--worse luck!--came into being as response to discomfort, to pain, to uncertainty, to problems, such as could not exist in a world truly made for us; while from time immemorial _pure_ as distinct from human consciousness has been identified with absolute certainty, with self-absorption and self-sufficiency; as a god, a goal to attain, not a fact to rest in. It is notable that those who believe the world actually to have been made for us devote most of their thinking to explaining away the experiences which have made all men feel that the world was actually not made for us. Their chief business, after proving the world to be all good, is solving "the problem of evil." Yet, had there really been no evil, this evil consequence could not have ensued: existence would have emerged as beatitude and not as adjustment; thinking might in truth have been self-absorbed contemplation, blissful intuition, not painful learning by the method of trial and error.

Alas that what "might have been" cannot come into being by force of discursive demonstration! If it could, goodness alone would have existed and been real, and evil would have been non-existence, unreality, and appearance--all by the force of the Word. As it is, the appearance of evil is in so far forth no less an evil than its reality; in truth, it is reality and its best witnesses are the historic attempts to explain it away. For even as "appearance" it has a definite and inexpugnable character of its own which cannot be destroyed by subsumption under the "standpoint of the whole," "the absolute good," the "over-individual values." Nor, since only sticks and stones break bones and names never hurt, can it be abolished by the epithet "appearance." To deny reality to evil is to multiply the evil. It is to make two "problems" grow where only one grew before, to add to the "problem of evil" the "problem of appearance" without serving any end toward the solution of the real problem how evil can be effectively abolished.

I may then, in view of these reflections, hold myself safe in assuming that the world we live in was not made for us; that, humanly speaking, it is open to improvement in a great many directions. It will be comparatively innocuous to assume also, as a corollary, that in so far as the world was made for mind, it has been made so by man, that civilization is the adaptation of nature to human nature. And as a second corollary it may be safely assumed that the world does not stay made; civilization has brought its own problems and peculiar evils.

I realize that, in the light of my title, much of what I have written above must seem irrelevant, since the "problem of evil" has not, within the philosophic tradition, been considered part of a "problem of values" as such. If I dwell on it, I do so to indicate that the "problem of evil" can perhaps be best understood in the light of another problem: the problem, namely, of why men have created the "problem of evil." For obviously, evil can be problematic only in an absolutely good world, and the idea that the world is absolutely good is not a generalization _upon_ experience, but a contradiction _of_ experience. If there exists a metaphysical "problem of evil," hence, it arises out of this generalization; it is secondary, not primary; and the primary problem requires solution before the secondary one can be understood. And what else, under the circumstances, can the primary one be than this: "Why do men contradict their own experience?"

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.

III

This has been, and still to a very great extent remains, most specifically true of philosophy. The environment with which philosophy concerns itself is nothing less than the whole universe; its content is, within the history of its dominant tradition, absolutely general and abstract; it is, of all great human enterprises, even religion, least constrained by the direction and march of events or the mandate of circumstance. Like music, it expresses most truly the immediate and intrinsic interests of the mind, its native bias and its inward goal. It has been constituted, for this reason, of the so-called "normative" sciences, envisaging the non-existent as real, forcing upon nature pure values, forms of the spirit incident to the total life of this world, unmixed with baser matter. To formulate ultimate standards, to be completely and utterly lyrical has been the prerogative of philosophy alone. Since these standards reappear in all other reconstructions of the environment and most clearly in art and in religion, it is pertinent to enumerate them, and to indicate briefly their bearing on existence.

The foremost outstanding is perhaps "the unity of the world." Confronted by the perplexing menace of the variation of experience, the dichotomies and oppositions of thoughts and things, the fusion and diversifications of many things into one and one into many, mankind has, from the moment it became reflective, felt in the relation of the One and the Many the presence of a riddle that engendered and sustained uneasiness, a mystery that concealed a threat. The mind's own preference, given the physiological processes that condition its existence, constitution, and operation, could hardly come to rest in a more fundamental normation than Unity. A world which is _one_ is easier to live in and with; initial adjustment therein is final adjustment; in its substance there exists nothing sudden and in its character nothing uncontrollable. It guarantees whatever vital equilibrium the organism has achieved in it, ill or good. It secures life in attainment and possession, insuring it repose, simplicity, and spaciousness. A world which is many complicates existence: it demands watchful consideration of irreducible discrete individualities: it necessitates the integration and humanization in a common system of adjustment of entities which in the last analysis refuse all ordering and reject all subordination, consequently keeping the mind on an everlasting jump, compelling it to pay with eternal vigilance the price of being. The preference for unity, then, is almost inevitable, and the history of philosophy, from the Vedas to the Brahma Somaj and from Thales to Bergson, is significantly unanimous in its attempts to prove that the world is, somehow, through and through one. That the oneness requires _proof_ is _prima facie_ evidence that it is a value, a desiderate, not an existence. And how valuable it is may be seen merely in the fact that it derealizes the inner conflict of interests, the incompatibilities between nature and man, the uncertainties of knowledge, and the certainties of evil, and substitutes therefore the ultimate happy unison which "the identity of the different" compels.

Unity is the common desiderate of philosophic systems of all metaphysical types--neutral, materialistic, idealistic. But the dominant tradition has tended to think this unity in terms of _interest_, of _spirit_, of _mentality_. It has tended, in a word, to assimilate nature to human nature, to identify things with the _values_ of things, to envisage the world in the image of man. To it, the world is all spirit, ego, or idea; and if not such through and through, then entirely subservient, in its unhumanized parts, to the purposes and interests of ego, idea, or spirit. Why, is obvious. A world of which the One substance is such constitutes a totality of interest and purpose which faces no conflict and has no enemy. It is fulfilment even before it is need, and need, indeed, is only illusion. Even when its number is many, the world is a better world if the stuff of these many is the _same_ stuff as the spirit of man. For mind is more at home with mind than with things; the pathetic fallacy is the most inevitable and most general. Although the totality of spirit is conceived as good, that is, as actualizing all our desiderates and ideals, it would still be felt that, even if the totality were evil, and not God, but the Devil ruled the roost, the world so constituted must be better than one utterly non-spiritual. We can understand and be at home with malevolence: it offers at least the benefits of similarity, of companionship, of intimateness, of consubstantiality with _will_; its behavior may be foreseen and its intentions influenced; but no horror can be greater than that of utter aliency. How much of religion turns with a persistent tropism to the consideration of the devil and his works, and how much it has fought his elimination from the cosmic scheme! Yet never because it loved the devil. The deep-lying reason is the fact that the humanization of Evil into Devil mitigates Evil and improves the world. Philosophy has been least free from this corrective and spiritizing bias. Though it has cared less for the devil, it has predominantly repudiated aliency, has sought to prove spirit the cause and substance of the world, and in that degree, to transmute the aliency of nature into sameness with human nature.

With unity and spirituality, _eternity_ makes a third. This norm is a fundamental attribute of the One God himself, and interchangeable with his ineffable name: the Lord is Eternal, and the Eternal, even more than the One, receives the eulogium of exclusive realness. To the philosophical tradition it is the most real. Once more the reason should be obvious. The underlying urge which pushes the mind to think the world as a unity pushes it even more inexorably to think the world as timeless. For unity is asserted only against the perplexities of a manyness which may be static and unchanging, and hence comparatively simple. But eternity is asserted and set against mutability: it is the negation of change, of time, of novelty, of the suddenness and slaughter of the flux of life itself, which consumes what it generates, undermines what it builds and sweeps to destruction what it founds to endure. Change is the arch-enemy of a life which struggles for self-_preservation_, of an intellect which operates spontaneously by the logic of identity, of a will which seeks to convert others into sames. It substitutes a different self for the old, it falsifies systems of thought and deteriorates systems of life. It makes unity impossible and manyness inevitable. It upsets every actual equilibrium that life attains. It opens the doors and windows of every closed and comfortable cosmos to all transcosmic winds that blow, with whatever they carry of possible danger and possible ill. It is the very soul of chaos in which the pleasant, ordered world is such a little helpless thing. Of this change eternity is by primary intention the negation, as its philological form shows. It is _not-time_, without positive intrinsic content, and in its secondary significances, i.e., in those significances which appear in metaphysical dialectic, without meaning; since it is there a pure negation, intrinsically affirming nothing, of the same character as "not-man" or "not-donkey," standing for a nature altogether unspecific and indeterminable in the residual universe. By a sort of obverse implication it does, however, possess, in the philosophic tradition, a positive content which accrues to it by virtue of what it denies. This content makes it a designation for the persistence and perdurability of desiderated quality--from metaphysical unity and spirituality to the happy hunting-grounds or a woman's affection. At bottom it means the assurance that the contents of value cannot and will not be altered or destroyed, that their natures and their relations to man do not undergo change. There is no recorded attempt to prove that evil is eternal: eternity is _eternity of the good alone_.

Unity, spirituality, and eternity, then, are the forms which contents of value receive under the shaping hands of the philosophic tradition, to which they owe their metaphysical designation and of which the business has so largely and uniquely been to _prove_ them the foundations and ontological roots of universal nature. But "the problem of evil" does not come to complete solution with these. Even in a single, metaphysically spiritual and unchanging world, man himself may still be less than a metaphysical absolute and his proper individuality doomed to absorption, his wishes to obstruction and frustration. Of man, therefore, the tradition posits _immortality_ and _freedom_, and even the materialistic systems have sought to keep somehow room for some form of these goods.

To turn first to immortality. Its source and matrix is less the love of life than the fear of death--that fear which Lucretius, dour poet of disillusion, so nobly deplored. That he had ever himself been possessed of it is not clear, but it is perfectly clear that his altogether sound arguments against it have not abolished its operation, nor its effect upon human character, society, and imagination. Fear which made the gods, made also the immortality of man, the denial of death. What the fear's unmistakable traits may be has never been articulately said, perhaps never can be said. Most of us never may undergo the fear of death; we undergo comfort and discomfort, joy and sorrow, intoxication and reaction, love and disgust; we aim to preserve the one and to abolish the other, but we do not knowingly undergo the fear of death. Indeed, it is logically impossible that we should, since to do so would be to acquire an experience of death such that we should be conscious of being unconscious, sensible of being insensible, aware of being unaware. We should be required to be and not to be at the same instant, in view of which Lucretius both logically and wisely advises us to remember that when death is, we are not; and when we are, death is not.

Experience and feeling are, however, neither logical nor wise, and to these death is far from the mere non-being which the poet would have us think it. To these it has a positive reality which makes the fear of it a genuine cause of conduct in individuals and in groups, with a basis in knowledge such as is realized in the diminishing of consciousness under anaesthetic, in dreams of certain types, and most generally in the nascent imitation of the _rigor mortis_ which makes looking upon the dead such a horror to most of us. Even then, however, something is lacking toward the complete realization of death, and children and primitive peoples never realize it at all. Its full meaning comes out as _an unsatisfied hunger in the living_ rather than as a condition of the dead, who, alive, would have satisfied this hunger. And the realization of this meaning requires sophistication, requires a lengthy corporate memory and the disillusions which civilization engenders. Primitive peoples ask for no proof of immortality because they have no notion of mortality; civilized thinking has largely concerned itself about the proof of immortality because its assurance of life has been shaken by the realization of death through the gnawing of desire which only the dead could still. The _proof_ which in the history of thought is offered again and again, be it noted, is not of the reality of life, but of the unreality and inefficacy of death. Immortality is like eternity, a negative term; it is _im_mortality. The experienced fact is mortality; and the fear of it is only an inversion of the desire which it frustrates, just as frustrated love becomes hatred. The doctrine of immortality, hence, springs from the fear of death, not from the love of life, and immortality is a value-form, not an existence. Now, although fear of death and love of life are in constant play in character and conduct, neither constitutes the original, innocent urge of life within us. "Will to live," "will to power," "struggle for existence," and other Germanic hypostases of experienced events which the great civil war in Europe is just now giving such an airing, hardly deserve, as natural data, the high metaphysical status that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and company have given them. They follow in fact upon a more primary type of living, acting form, a type to which the "pathetic fallacy" or any other manner of psychologizing may not apply. The most that can be said about this type is that its earlier stages are related to its later ones as potential is to kinetic energy. If, since we are discussing a metaphysical issue, we must mythologize, we might call it the "will to self-expression." Had this "will" chanced to happen in a world which was made for it, or had it itself been the substance of the world, "struggle for existence," "will to live," and "will to power," never could have supervened. All three of these expressions designate data which require an opposite, a counter-will, to give them meaning. There can be a struggle for existence only when there are obstacles thereto, a will to live only when there are obstructions to life, a will to power only when there is a resistance against which power may be exercised. Expression alone is self-implying and self-sufficient, and in an altogether favorable environment we might have realized our instincts, impulses, interests, appetites and desires, expressed and actualized our potentialities, and when our day is done, have ceased, as unconcerned about going on as about starting.

Metchnikoff speaks somewhere of an instinct toward death and the euphoria which accompanies its realization. He cites, I think, no more than two or three cases. To most of us the mere notion of the existence and operation of such an instinct seems fanciful and uncanny. Yet from the standpoint of biology nothing should be more natural. Each living thing has its span, which consists of a cycle from birth through maturation and senescence to dissolution, and the latter half of the process is as "fateful" and "inevitable" as the former! Dying is itself the inexpugnable conclusion of that setting free of organic potentialities which we call life, and if dying seems horrid and unnatural, it seems so because for most of us death is violent, because its occasion is a shock from without, not the realization of a tendency from within. In a completely favorable environment we should not struggle to exist, we should simply exist; we should not will to live, we should simply live, i.e., we should actualize our potentialities and die.

But, once more alas, our environment is not completely favorable, and there's the rub. That disorderly constellation of instincts and appetites and interests which constitutes the personality of the best of us does not work itself out evenly. At the most favorable, our self-realizations are lopsided and distorted. For every capacity of ours in full play, there are a score at least mutilated, sometimes extirpated, always repressed. They never attain the free fullness of expression which is consciousness, or when they do, they find themselves confronted with an opponent which neutralizes their maturation at every point. Hence, as I have already indicated, they remain in, or revert to, the subterranean regions of our lives, and govern the making of our biographies from their seats below. What they fail to attain in fact they succeed in generating in imagination to compensate for the failure; they realize themselves vicariously. The doctrine of immortality is the generic form of such vicarious self-realization, as frequently by means of dead friends and relatives to whose absolute non-being the mind will not assent, as by means of the everlasting heaven in which the mind may forever disport itself amid those delights it had to forego on earth. Much of the underlying motive of the doctrine is a _sehnsucht_ and nostalgia after the absent dead; little a concern for the continuity of the visible living. And often this passion is so intense that system after system in the philosophic tradition is constructed to satisfy it, and even the most disillusioned of systems--for example, Spinoza's--will preserve its form if not its substance.

That the "freedom of the will" shall be a particularized compensatory desiderate like the immortality of the soul, the unity, the spirituality, and the eternity of the world is a perversion worked upon this ideal by the historic accident we call Christianity. The assumptions of that theory concerning the nature of the universe and the destiny of man, being through and through compensatory, changed freedom from the possible fact and actual hope of Hellenic systems into the "problem" of the Christian ones. The consequent controversy over "free-will," the casuistic entanglement of this ideal with the notion of responsibility, its theological development in the problem of the relation of an omnipotent God to a recalcitrant creature, have completely obscured its primal significance. For the ancients, the free man and the "wise man" were identical, and the wise man was one who all in all had so mastered the secrets of the universe that there was no desire of his that was not actually realized, no wish the satisfaction of which was obstructed. His way in the world was a way without let or hindrance. Now freedom and wisdom in this sense is never a fact and ever a value. Its attainment ensues upon created distinctions between appearance and reality, upon the postulation of the metaphysical existence of the value-forms of the unity, spirituality, and the eternity of the world, in the realization of which the wise man founded his wisdom and gained his freedom. Freedom, then, is an ideal that could have arisen only in the face of _obstruction to action directed toward the fulfilling and satisfying of interests_. It is the assurance of the smooth and uninterrupted flow of behavior; the flow of desire into fulfilment, of thought into deed, of act into fact. It is perhaps the most pervasive and fundamental of all desiderates, and in a definite way the others may be said to derive from it and to realize it. For the soul's immortality, the world's unity and spirituality and eternity, are but conditions which facilitate and assure the flow of life without obstruction. They define a world in which danger, evil, and frustration are non-existent; they so reconstitute our actual environment that the obstructions it offers to the course of life are abolished. They make the world "rational," and in the great philosophic tradition the freedom of man is held to be a function of the rationality of the world. Thus, even deterministic solutions of the "problem of freedom" are at bottom no more than the rationalization of natural existence by the dialectical removal of obstructions to human existence. Once more, Spinoza's solution is typical, and its form is that of all idealisms as well. It ensues by way of identification of the obstruction's interest with those of the obstructee: the world becomes ego or the ego the world, with nothing outside to hinder or to interfere. In the absolute, existence is declared to be value _de facto_; in fact, _de jure_. And by virtue of this compensating reciprocity the course of life runs free.

Is any proof necessary that these value-forms are not the contents of the daily life? If there be, why this unvarying succession of attempts to _prove_ that they are the contents of daily life that goes by the name of history of philosophy? In fact, experience as it comes from moment to moment is not one, harmonious and orderly, but multifold, discordant, and chaotic. Its stuff is not spirit, but stones and railway wrecks and volcanoes and Mexico and submarines, and trenches, and frightfulness, and Germany, and disease, and waters, and trees, and stars, and mud. It is not eternal, but changes from instant to instant and from season to season. Actually, men do not live forever; death is a fact, and immortality is literally as well as in philosophic discourse not so much an aspiration for the continuity of life as an aspiration for the elimination of death, purely _im_mortality. Actually the will is not free, each interest encounters obstruction, no interest is completely satisfied, all are ultimately cut off by death.

Such are the general features of all human experience, by age unwithered, and with infinite variety forever unstaled. The traditional philosophic treatment of them is to deny their reality, and to call them appearance, and to satisfy the generic human interest which they oppose and repress by means of the historical reconstruction in imaginative dialectic of a world constituted by these most generalized value-forms and then to eulogize the reconstruction with the epithet "reality." When, in the course of human events, such reconstruction becomes limited to the biography of particular individuals, is an expression of their concrete and unique interest, is lived and acted on, it is called paranoia. The difference is not one of kind, but of concreteness, application, and individuality. Such a philosophy applied universally in the daily life is a madness, like Christian Science: kept in its proper sphere, it is a fine art, the finest and most human of the arts, a reconstruction in discourse of the whole universe, in the image of the free human spirit. Philosophy has been reasonable because it is so unpersonal, abstract, and general, like music; because, in spite of its labels, its reconstructions remain pure desiderates and value-forms, never to be confused with and substituted for existence. But philosophers even to this day often have the delusion that the substitutions are actually made.[92]

IV

It is the purity of the value-forms imagined in philosophy that makes philosophy "normative." The arts, which it judges, have an identical origin and an indistinguishable intent, but they are properly its subordinates because they have not its purity. They, too, aim at remodeling discordant nature into harmony with human nature. They, too, are dominated by value-forms which shall satisfy as nearly as possible all interests, shall liberate and fulfil all repressions, and shall supply to our lives that unity, eternity, spirituality, and freedom which are the exfoliations of our central desire--the desire to live. But where philosophy has merely negated the concrete stuff of experience and defined its reality in terms of desire alone, the arts acknowledge the reality of immediate experience, accept it as it comes, eliminating, adding, molding, until the values desiderated become existent in the concrete immediacies of experience as such. Art does not substitute values for existence by changing their roles and calling one appearance and the other reality: art converts values into existences, it realizes values, injecting them into nature as far as may be. It creates truth and beauty and goodness. But it does not claim for its results greater reality than nature's. It claims for its results greater immediate harmony with human interests than nature. The propitious reality of the philosopher is the unseen: the harmonious reality of the artist must be sensible. Philosophy says that apparent actual evil is merely apparent: art compels potential apparent good actually to appear. Philosophy realizes fundamental values transcendentally beyond experience: art realizes them within experience. Thus, men cherish no illusions concerning the contents of a novel, a picture, a play, a musical composition. They are taken for what they are, and are enjoyed for what they are. The shopgirl, organizing her life on the basis of eight dollars a week, wears flimsy for broadcloth and the tail feather of a rooster for an ostrich plume. She is as capable of wearing and enjoying broadcloth and ostrich plume as My Lady, whose income is eight dollars a minute. But she has not them, and in all likelihood, without a social revolution she never will have them. In the novels of Mr. Robert Chambers, however, or of Miss Jean Libbey, which she religiously reads in the street-car on her way to the shop; in the motion picture theater which she visits for ten cents after her supper of corned beef, cabbage, and cream puffs, she comes into possession of them forthwith, vicariously, and of all My Lady's proper perquisites--the Prince Charming, the motor-car, the Chinese pug, the flowers, and the costly bonbons. For the time being her life is liberated, new avenues of experience are actually opened to her, all sorts of unsatisfied desires are satisfied, all sorts of potentialities realized. All that she might have been and is not, she becomes through art, here and now, and _continuously with_ the drab workaday life which is her lot, and she becomes this without any compensatory derealization of that life, without any transcendentalism, without any loss of grip on the necessities of her experience: strengthened, on the contrary, and emboldened, to meet them as they are.

I might multiply examples: for every object of fine art has the same intention, and if adequate, accomplishes the same end--from the sculptures of Phidias and the dramas of Euripides, to the sky-scrapers of Sullivan and the dances of Pavlowa. But there is need only to consider the multitude of abstract descriptions of the aesthetic encounter. The artist's business is to create the other object in the encounter, and this object, in Miss Puffer's words, which are completely representative and typical, is such that "the organism is in a condition of repose and of the highest possible tone, functional efficiency, enhanced life. The personality is brought into a state of unity and self-completeness." The object, when apprehended, awakens the active functioning of the whole organism directly and harmoniously with itself, cuts it off from the surrounding world, shuts that world out for the time being, and forms a complete, harmonious, and self-sufficient system, peculiar and unique in the fact that there is no passing from this deed into further adaptation with the object. Struggle and aliency are at end, and whatever activity now goes on feels self-conserving, spontaneous, free. The need of readjustment has disappeared, and with it the feeling of strain, obstruction, and resistance, which is its sign. There is nothing but the object, and that is possessed completely, satisfying, and as if forever. Art, in a word, supplies an environment from which strife, foreignness, obstruction, and death are eliminated. It actualizes unity, spirituality, and eternity in the environment; it frees and enhances the life of the self. To the environment which art successfully creates, the mind finds itself completely and harmoniously adapted by the initial act of perception.

In the world of art, value and existence are one.

V

If art may be said to create values, religion has been said to conserve them. But the values conserved are not those created: they are the values postulated by philosophy as metaphysical reality. Whereas, however, philosophy substitutes these values for the world of experience, religion makes them continuous with the world of experience. For religion value and existence are on the same level, but value is more potent and environs existence, directing it for its own ends. The unique content of religion, hence, is a specific imaginative extension of the environment with value-forms: the visible world is extended at either end by heaven and hell; the world of minds, by God, Satan, angels, demons, saints, and so on. But where philosophy imaginatively abolishes existence in behalf of value, where art realizes value in existence, religion tends to control and to escape the environment which exists by means of the environment which is postulated. The aim of religion is salvation from sin. Salvation is the escape from experience to heaven and the bosom of God; while hell is the compensatory readjustment of inner quality to outer condition for the alien and the enemy, without the knowledge of whose existence life in heaven could not be complete.

In religion, hence, the conversion of the repressed array of interests into ideal value-forms is less radical and abstract than in philosophy, and less checked by fusion with existence than in art. Religion is, therefore, at one and the same time more carnal and less reasonable than philosophy and art. Its history and protagonists exhibit a closer kinship to what is called insanity[93]--that being, in essence, the substitution in actual life of the creatures of the imagination which satisfy repressed needs for those of reality which repress them. It is a somnambulism which intensifies rather than abolishes the contrast between what is desired and what must be accepted. It offers itself ultimately rather as a refuge from reality than a control of it, and its development as an institution has turned on the creation and use of devices to make this escape feasible. For religion, therefore, the perception that the actual world, whatever its history, is now _not_ adapted to human nature, is the true point of departure. Thus religion takes more account of experience than compensatory philosophy; it does not de-realize existent evil. The outer conflict between human nature and nature, primitively articulated in consciousness and conduct by the distress engendered through the fact that the food supply depends upon the march of the seasons,[94] becomes later assimilated to the inner conflict between opposing interests, wishes, and desires. Finally, the whole so constituted gets expressed in the idea of sin. That idea makes outward prosperity dependent upon inward purity, although it often transfers the locus of the prosperity to another world. Through its operation fortune becomes a function of conscience and the one desire of religious thinking and religious practice becomes to bring the two to a happy outcome, to abolish the conflicts. This desiderated abolition is salvation. It is expressed in the ideas of a fall, or a separation from heaven and reunion therewith. The machinery of this reunion of the divided, the reconversion of the differentiated into the same, consists of the furniture of religious symbols and ceremonials--myths, baptisms, sacraments, prayers, and sacrifices: and all these are at the same time instruments and expressions of desires. God is literally "the conservation of values."[95] "God's life in eternity," writes Aristotle, who here dominates the earlier tradition, "is that which we enjoy in our best moments, but are unable to possess permanently: its very being is delight. And as actual being is delight, so the various functions of waking, perceiving, thinking, are to us the pleasantest parts of our life. Perfect and absolute thought is just this absolute vision of perfection."[96]

Even the least somnambulistic of the transcendental philosophies has repeated, not improved upon Aristotle. "The highest conceptions that I get from experience of what goodness and beauty are," Royce declares, "the noblest life that I can imagine, the completest blessedness that I can think, all these are but faint suggestions of a truth that is infinitely realized in the Divine, that knows all truth. Whatever perfection there is suggested in these things, that he must fully know and experience."

But this aesthetic excellence, this maximum of ideality is in and by itself inadequate. God, to be God, must _work_. He is first of all the invisible socius, the ever-living witness, in whose eyes the disharmonies and injustices of this life are enregistered, and who in the life everlasting redresses the balances and adjusts the account. Even his grace is not unconditional; it requires a return, in deed or faith; a payment by which the fact of his salvation is made visible. But this payment is made identical by the great religions of disillusion with nothing other than the concrete condition from which the faithful are to be saved. If the self is not impoverished, unkempt, and hungry, in fact, it is made so. Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but self-defilement is godliness; sainthood, if we are to trust the lives of saints, whether in Asia or in Europe, is coincident with insanitation; saintly virtues are depressed virtues,--humility, hope, meekness, pity; and such conditions of life which define the holy ones are unwholesome--poverty, asceticism, squalor, filth. Hence, by an ironic inversion, religions of disillusion, being other-worldly, identify escape from an actual unpropitious environment with submergence in it; that being the visible and indispensable sign of an operative grace. So the beatitudes: the blessed are the poor, the mourners, the meek. Beginning as a correction of the evils of existence, religion ends by offering an infallible avenue of escape from them through postulating a desiderated type of existence which operates to gather the spirit to itself. For this reason the value-forms of the spirituality or spiritual control of the universe and of the immortality of the soul have been very largely the practical concern of religion alone, since these are the instruments indispensable to the attainment of salvation. In so far forth religion has been an art and its institutional association with the arts has been made one of its conspicuous justifications. So far, however, as it has declared values to be operative without making them actually existent it has been only a black art, a magic. It has ignored the actual causes in the nature and history of things, and has substituted for them non-existent desirable causes, ultimately reducible to a single, eternal, beneficent spirit, omnipotent and free. To convert these into existence, an operation which is the obvious intent of much contemporary thinking in religion,[97] it must, however, give up the assumption that they already exist _qua_ spirit. But when religion gives up this assumption, religion gives up the ghost.

What it demands of the ghost, and of all hypostatized or anthropomorphized ultimate value-forms, is that they shall work, and its life as an institution depends upon making them work. Christian Science becomes a refuge from the failure of science, magic from mechanism, and by means of them and their kind, blissful immortality, complete self-fulfilment is to be attained--after death. There is a "beautiful land of somewhere," a happy life beyond, but it is beyond life. In fact, although religion confuses value and existence, it localizes the great value-forms outside of existence. Its history has been an epic of the retreat and decimation of the gods from the world, a movement from animism and pluralism to transcendentalism and monism; and concomitantly, of an elaboration and extension of institutional devices by which the saving value-forms are to be made and kept operative in the world.

VI

Let us consider this history a little.

Consciousness of feeling, psychologists are agreed, is prior to consciousness of the objects of feeling. The will's inward strain, intense throbs of sensation, pangs and pulses of pleasure and pain make up the bulk of the undifferentiated primal sum of sentience. The soul is aware of herself before she is aware of her world. A childish or primeval mind, face to face with an environment actual, dreamt, or remembered, does not distinguish from its privacy the objective or the common. All is shot through with the pathos and triumph which come unaccountably as desired good or evaded evil; all has the same tensions and effects ends in the same manner as the laboring, straining, volitional life within. These feelings, residuary qualities, the last floating, unattached sediment of a world organized by association and classified by activity, these subtlest of all its beings, finally termed mind and self, at first suffuse and dominate the whole. Even when objects are distinguished and their places determined these are not absent; and the so-called pre-animistic faiths are not the less suffused with spirit because the spiritual has not yet received a local habitation and name. They differ from animism in this only, not in that their objects are characterized by lack of animation and vital tonality. And this is necessary. For religion must be anthropopathic before it becomes anthropomorphic; since feeling, eloquent of good and evil, is the first and deepest essence of consciousness, and only by its wandering from home are forms distinguished and man's nature separated from that of things and beasts.

When practice has cooerdinated activity, and reflection distinguished places, animism proper arises. First the environment is felt as the soul's kindred; then its operations are fancied in terms dramatic and personal. The world becomes almost instinctively defined as a hegemony of spirits similar to man, with powers and passions like his, and directed for his destruction or conservation, but chiefly for their own glory and self-maintenance. The vast "pathetic fallacy" makes religion of the whole of life. It is at this point indistinguishable from science or ethics. It is, in fact, the pregnant matrix of all subsequent discourse about the universe. Its character is such that it becomes the determinating factor of human adaptations to the conditions imposed by the environment, by envisaging the enduring and efficacious elements among these conditions as persons. The satisfaction of felt needs is rendered thereby inevitably social; and in a like manner fear of their frustration cannot be unsocial. Life is conceived and acted out as a miraculous traffic with the universe; and the universe as a band of spirits who monopolize the good and make free gifts of evil, who can be feared, threatened, worshiped, scolded, wheedled, coaxed, bribed, deceived, enslaved, held in awe, and above all, used for the prosecution of desiderated ends and the fulfilment of instinctive desires. The first recorded cognized order is a moral order in which fragmentary feelings, instinctive impulsions, and spontaneous imaginings are hypostatized, ideas are identified with their causes, all the contents of the immature, sudden, primitive, blundering consciousness receive a vital figure and a proper name. So man makes himself more at home in the world without,--that world which enslaves the spirit so fearfully and with such strangeness, and which just as miraculously yields such ecstasy, such power, such unaccountable good! In this immediate sense the soul controls the world by becoming symbolic of it; it is the world's first language. It is, however, an inarticulate, blundering, incoherent thing and the cues which it furnishes to the nature of the environment are as often as not dangerous and misleading. When bows and arrows, crystals and caves, clouds and waters, dung and dew, mountains and trees, beasts and visions, are treated as chiefs and men must be treated, then the moral regimen initiated, taking little account of the barest real qualities manifested by these things, and attributing the maximum importance to the characters postulated and foreign, is successful neither in allaying evil nor in extending good. Its benefits are adventitious and its malfeasance constant. Food buried with the dead was food lost; blood smeared upon the bow to make it shoot better served only to make the hands unskilful by impeding their activity. Initiation, ceremony, sacrificial ritual, fasting, and isolation involved privations for which no adequate return was recovered, even by the medicine-man whose absolute and ephemeral power needed only the betrayal of circumstances for its own destruction, taking him along with it, oftener than not, to disgrace or death.

As the cumulus of experience on experience grew greater, chance violations of tradition, or custom, or ritual, or formula achieving for the violator a mastery or stability which performance and obedience failed to achieve, the new heresy became the later orthodoxy, for in religion, as in all other matters human, nothing succeeds like success. An impotent god has no divinity; a disused potency means a dying life among the immortals as on the earth. And as the gods themselves seemed often to give their worshipers the lie, the futility of the personal and dramatic definitions of the immediate environment became slowly recognized, the recognition varying in extent, and clearer in practice than in discourse.

Accordingly the most primitive of the animisms underwent a necessary modification. The plasticity of objects under destructive treatment, the impotence of _taboo_ before elementary needs, the adequate satisfactions which violations of the divine law brought,--these killed many gods and drove others from their homes in the hearts of things. The objects so purged became matters of accurate knowledge. Where animation is denied the _whole_ environment, wisdom begins to distinguish between spirit-haunted matter and the purely material; knowledge of person and knowledge of things differentiate, and science, the impersonal and more potent knowledge of the environment, properly begins. Familiarity leads to control, control to contempt, and for the unreflective mind, personality is not, as for the sophisticated, an attribute of the contemptible. The incalculable appearance of thunder, the magic greed of fire, the malice, the spontaneity, the thresh and pulse as of life which seems to characterize whatever is capricious or impenetrable or uncontrollable are too much like the felt throbs of consciousness to become dehumanized. To the variable alone, therefore, is transcendent animation attributed. Not the seasonal variation of the sun's heat, but the joy and the sorrow of which his heat is the occasion made him divine. When the gods appear, to take the place of the immanent spirits immediately present in things, they appear, therefore, as already transcendent, with habitations just beyond the well-known: on high mountains, in the skies, in dark forests, in caves, in all regions feared or unexplored. But chiefly the gods inhabit those spaces whence issue the power of darkness and destruction, particularly the heaven, a word whose meaning is now, as it was primitively, identical with divinity. The savage becomes a pagan by giving concrete personality to the dreadful unknown. Thence it is that the ancient poet assigns the gods a lineage of fear; and fear may truly be said to have made the gods, in so far as the gods personify the fear which made them.

The moral level of these figments alters with the level of their habitation; their power varies with their remoteness; Zeus lives in the highest heaven and is arbiter of the destiny of both gods and man. To him and to his like there cannot be the relation of equality which is sustained between men and spirits of the lower order. His very love is blasting; interchange of commodities, good for good and evil for evil is not possible where he is concerned. Gods of the higher order he exemplifies, even all the gods of Olympus, of the Himalayas, of Valhalla, are literally beings invoked and implored, as well as dwellers in heaven. To them man pays a toll on all excellence he gains or finds; libations and burnt-offerings, the fat and the first fruits: he exists by their sufferance and serves their caprice. He is their toy, born for their pleasure, and living by their need.

But just because men conceive themselves to be play-things of the gods, they define in the gods the ideals of mankind. For the divine power is power to live forever, and the sum of human desire is just the desire to maintain its humanity in freedom and happiness endlessly. And exactly those capacities and instruments of self-maintenance,--all that is beauty, or truth, or goodness, the very essence of value in any of its forms,--the gods are conceived to possess and to control: these they may grant, withhold, destroy. They are as eternal as their habitations, the mountains; as ruthless as their element, the sea; as omnipresent as the heavens, their home. To become like the gods, therefore, the masters and fathers of men, is to remain eternally and absolutely human: so that who is most like them on earth takes his place beside them in heaven. Hercules and Elias and Krishna, Caka-Muni and Ishvara, Jesus and Baha Ullah. Nay, they are the very gods themselves, manifest as men! The history of the gods thus presents a double aspect: it is first a characterization of the important objects and processes of nature and their survival-values,--the sun, thunder, rain, and earthquakes; dissolution, rebirth, and love; and again it is the narration of activities native and delightful to mankind. Zeus is a promiscuous lover as well as a wielder of thunderbolts; Apollo not only drives the chariot of the sun; he plays and dances, discourses melody and herds sheep.

But while the portrait of the heart's desire in fictitious adventures of divinity endears the gods to the spirit, the exploration of the elements in the environment whose natures they dramatically express, destroys their force, reduces their number, and drives them still further into the unknown. Olympus is surrendered for the planets and the fixed stars. With remoteness of location comes transmutation of character. The forces of the environment which were the divinity are now conceived as instrumental to its uses. Its power is more subtly described; its nature becomes a more purely ideal expression of human aspiration. Physical remoteness and metaphysical ultimacy are akin. God among the stars is better than God on Olympus. If, as with the Parsees, the unfavorable character of the environment is expressed in another and equal being,--the devil, then the god of good must, in the symbolic struggle, become the ultimate victor and remain the more potent director of man's destiny. In religion, therefore, when the mind grows at all by experience, monism develops spontaneously. For the character of the god becomes increasingly more relevant to hope than to the conditions of hope's satisfaction. And what man first of all and beyond all aspires to, is that single, undivided good,--the free flow of his unitary life, stable, complete, eternal. There is hence always to be found a chief and father among the gods who, as mankind gain in wisdom and in material power, consumes his mates and his children like Kronos or Jahweh, inherits their attributes and performs their functions. The chief divinity becomes the only divinity; a god becomes God. But divinity, in becoming one and unique, becomes also transcendent. Monotheism pushes God altogether beyond the sensible environment. Personality, instead of being the nature of the world, has become its ground and cause, and all that mankind loves is conserved, in order that man, whom God loves, may have his desire and live forever. Life is eternal and happiness necessary, beyond nature,--in heaven. Finally, in transcendental idealism, the poles meet; what has been put eternally apart is eternally united; the immaterial, impalpable, transcendent heaven is made one and continuous with the gross and unhappy natural world. One _is_ the other; the other the one. God _is_ the world and transcends it; _is_ the evil and the good which conquers and consumes that evil. The environment becomes thus described as a single, eternal, conscious unity, in which all the actual but transitory values of the actual but transitory life are conserved and eternalized. In a description of God such as Royce's or Aristotle's the environment is the eternity of all its constituents that are dearest to man. Religion, which began as a definition of the environment as it moved and controlled mankind, ends by describing it as mankind desires it to be. The environment is now the aforementioned ideal socius or self which satisfies perfectly all human requirements. Pluralistic and quarrelsome animism has become monistic and harmonious spiritism. Forces have turned to excellences and needs to satisfactions. Necessity has been transmuted to Providence, sin has been identified with salvation, value with existence, and existence with impotence and illusion before Providence, salvation, and value.

VII

With this is completed the reply to the question: Why do men contradict their own experience? Experience is, as Spinoza says, passion and action, both inextricably mingled and coincident, with the good and evil of them as interwoven as they. That piecemeal conquest of the evil which we call civilization has not even the promise of finality. It is a Penelope's web, always needing to be woven anew. Now, in experience desire anticipates and outleaps action and fact rebuffs desire. Desire realizes itself, consequently, in ideas objectified by the power of speech into independent and autonomous subjects of discourse, whereby experience is One, Eternal, a Spirit or Spiritually Controlled, wherein man has Freedom and Immortality. These, the constantly desiderated traits of a perfect universe, are in fact the limits of what adequacy environmental satisfactions can attain, ideas hypostatized, normative of existence, but not constituting it. With them, in philosophy and religion, the mind confronts the experiences of death and obstruction, of manifoldness, change and materiality, and denies them, as Peter denied Jesus. The visible world, being not as we want it, we imagine an unseen one that satisfies our want, declaring the visible one an illusion by its side. So we work a radical substitution of desiderates for actualities, of ideals for facts, of values for existences. Art alone acknowledges the actual relations between these contrasting pairs. Art alone so operates as in fact to convert their oppugnance into identity. Intrinsically, its whole purpose and technique consists of transmutation of values into existences, in the incarnation the realization of values. The philosophy and religion of tradition, on the contrary, consists intrinsically in the flat denial of reality, or at least, co-reality, to existence, and the transfer of that eulogium to value-forms as such.

Metaphysics, theology, ethics, logic, aesthetics, dialectic developments as they are of "norms" or "realities" which themselves can have no meaning without the "apparent," changing world they measure and belie, assume consequently a detachment and self-sufficiency they do not actually possess. Their historians have treated them as if they had no context, as if the elaboration of the ideal tendencies of the successive systems explained their origin, character, and significance. But in fact they are unendowed with this pure intrinsicality, and their development is not to be accounted for as exteriorization of innate motive or an unfoldment of inward implications. They have a context; they are crossed and interpenetrated by outer interests and extraneous considerations. Their meaning, in so far as it is not merely aesthetic, is _nil_ apart from these interests and considerations of which they are sometimes expressions, sometimes reconstructions, and from which they are persistently refuges.

Philosophy and religion are, in a word, no less than art, social facts. They are responses to group situations without which they cannot be understood. Although analysis has shown them to be rooted in certain persistent motives and conditions of human nature by whose virtue they issue in definite contours and significances, they acquire individuality and specific importance only through interaction with the constantly varying social situations in which they arise, on which they operate, and by which they are in turn operated on. Philosophy has perhaps suffered most of all from nescience of those and from devoting itself, at a minimum, to the satisfaction of that passion for oneness, for "logical consistency" without which philosophic "systems" would never arise, nor the metaphysical distinction between "appearance" and "reality"; and with which the same systems have made up a historic aggregate of strikingly repugnant and quarrelsome units. It is this pursuit of consistency as against correctness which has resulted in the irrelevance of philosophy that the philosopher, unconscious of his motives and roots, or naively identifying, through the instrumentality of an elaborate dialectic, his instinctive and responsive valuations of existence with its categoric essences, confuses with inward autonomy and the vision of the "real." Consequently, the systems of tradition begin as attempts to transvalue social situations whose existence is troublesome and end as utterances of which the specific bearing, save to the system of an opponent, is undiscoverable. The attempt to correct the environment in fact concludes as an abolition of it in words. The philosophic system becomes a solipsism, a pure lyric expression of the appetites of human nature.

For this perversity of the philosophic tradition Plato is perhaps, more than any one else, answerable. He is the first explicitly to have reduplicated the world, to have set existences over against values, to have made them dependent upon values, to have assigned absolute reality to the compensatory ideals, and to have identified philosophy with preoccupation with these ideals. Behind his theory of life lay far from agreeable personal experience of the attitude of political power toward philosophic ideas. Its ripening was coincident with the most distressing period of the history of his country. The Peloponnesian War was the confrontation of two social systems, radically opposed in form, method, and outlook. Democracy, in Athens, had become synonymous with demagoguery, corruption, inefficiency, injustice and unscrupulousness in every aspect of public affairs. The government had no consistent policy and no centralized responsibility; divided counsel led to continual disaster without, and party politics rotted the strength within. Beside Athens, Sparta, a communistic oligarchy, was a tower of strength and effectiveness. The Spartans made mistakes; they were slow, inept, rude, and tyrannical, but they were a unit on the war, their policy was consistent, responsibilities were adequately centered, good order and loyalty designated the aims and habits of life.[98] The Republic is the response to the confrontation of Spartan and Athenian; the attempt to find an adequate solution of the great social problem this confrontation expressed. The successful state becomes in it the model for the metaphysical one, and the difference between fact and ideal is amended by dialectically forcing the implications of existence in the direction of desire. Neither Athens nor Sparta presented a completely satisfactory social organization. There must therefore exist a type of social organization which is so satisfying. It must have existed from eternity, and must be in essence identical with eternal good, identical with that oneness and spirituality, lacking which, nothing is important. This archetypal social organization whose essence is excellence, it is the congenital vocation of the philosopher to contemplate and to realize. Philosophers are hence the paragons among animals, lovers of truth, haters of falsehood and of multiplicity, spectators of all time and all existence. In them the power to govern should be vested. Their nature is of the same stuff as the Highest Good with which it concerns itself, but being such, it appears, merely "appears" alas! irrelevant to the actual situations of the daily life. The philosopher is hence opposed and expelled by that arch-sophist, Public Opinion: the man on the street, failing to understand him, dubs him prater, star-gazer, good-for-nothing.[99] He becomes an ineffectual stranger, an outlaw, in a world in which he should be master.

Plato's description of the philosopher and philosophy is, it will be seen, at once an apology and a program. But it is a program which has been petrified into a compensatory ideal. The confession of impotence, the abandonment of the programmatic intent is due to identification of the ideal with metaphysical fact, to the hypostasis of the ideal. With Christianism, that being a philosophy operating as a religion, world-weariness made the apology unnecessary and converted the hypostasis into the basis of that program of complete surrender of the attempt to master the problems of existence upon which ensued the arrest of science and civilization for a thousand years. The Greeks were not world-weary, and consequently, their joy in life and existence contributed a minimum of relevance to their other-worldly dreams. Need it be reasserted that the whole Platonic system, at its richest and best in the Republic, is both an expression of and a compensation for a concrete social situation? Once it was formulated it became a part of that situation, altered it, served as another among the actual causes which determined the subsequent history of philosophy. Its historic and efficacious significance is defined by that situation, but philosophers ignore the situation and accept the system as painters accept a landscape--as the thing in itself.

Now, the aesthetic aspect of the philosophic system, its autonomy, and consequent irrelevancy, are undeniable. Once it comes to be, its intrinsic excellence may constitute its infallible justification for existence, with no more to be said; and if its defenders or proponents claimed nothing more for it than this immediate satisfactoriness, there would be no quarrel with them. There is, however, present in their minds a sense of the other bearings of their systems. They claim them, in any event, to be _true_, that is, to be relevant to a situation regarded as more important because more lastingly determinative of conduct, more "real" than the situation of which they are born. Their systems are offered, hence, as maps of life, as guides to the everlasting. That they intend to define some method for the conservation of life eternally, is clear enough from their initial motivation and formal issue: all the Socratics, with their minds fixed on happiness or salvation according to the prevalence of disillusionment among them; the Christian systems, still Socratic, but as resolutely other-worldly as disillusioned Buddhists; the systems of Spinoza, of Kant, the whole subsequent horde of idealisms, up to the contemporary Germanoid and German idealistic soliloquies,--they all declare that the vanity and multiplicity of life as it is leads them to seek for the permanent and the meaningful, and they each find it according to the idiosyncrasies of the particular impulses and terms they start with. That their Snark turns out in every case to be a Boojum is another story.

Yet this story is what gives philosophy, like religion, its social significance. If its roots, as its actual biography shows, did not reach deep in the soil of events, if its issues had no fruitage in events made over by its being, it would never have been so closely identified with intelligence and its systematic hypostasis would never have ensued. The fact is that philosophy, like all forms of creative intelligence, is a tool before it is a perfection. Its autonomy supervenes on its efficaciousness; it does not precede its efficaciousness. Men philosophize in order to live before they live in order to philosophize. Aristotle's description of the self-sufficiency of theory is possible only for a life wherein theory had already earned this self-sufficiency as practice, in a life, that is, which is itself an art, organized by the application of value-forms to its existent psycho-physical processes in such a way that its existence incarnates the values it desiderates and the values perfect the existence that embodies them.

The biography of philosophy, hence, reveals it to have the same possibilities and the same fate that all other ideas have. Today ideas are the patent of our humanity, the stuff and form of intelligence, the differentiae between us and the beasts. In so far forth, they express the surplusage of vitality over need, the creative freedom of life at play. This is the thing we see in the imaginings and fantasies of childhood, whose environment is by social intent formed to favor and sustain its being. The capacity for spontaneity of idea appears to decrease with maturity, and the few favored healthy mortals with whom it remains are called men of genius. William James was such a man, and there are a few still among the philosophers. But in the mass and in the long run, ideas are not a primary confirmation of our humanity; in the mass and long they are warnings of menace to it, a sign of its disintegration. Even so radical an intellectualist as Mr. Santayana cherishes this observation to the degree of almost suggesting it as the dogma that all ideas have their origin in inner or outer maladjustment.[100] However this may be, that the dominant philosophic ideas arise out of radical disharmonies between nature and human nature need not be here reiterated, while the provocative character of minor maladjustments is to be inferred from the fertility of ideas in unstable minds, of whatever type, from the neurasthenic to the mad. Ideas represent in these cases the limits of vital elasticity, the attempt of the organism to maintain its organic balance; it is as if a balloon, compressed on one side, bulged on the other.

Ideas, then, bear three types of relations to organic life, relations socially incarnated in traditional art, religion, and philosophy. First of all they may be an expression of innate capacities, the very essence of the freedom of life. In certain arts, such as music, they are just this. In the opposite case they may be the effect of the compression of innate capacities, an outcome of obstruction to the free low of life. They are then compensatory. Where expressive ideas are confluent with existence, compensatory ideas diverge from existence; they become pure value-forms whose paramount realization is traditional philosophy. Their rise and motivation in both these forms is unconscious. They are ideas, but not yet intelligence. The third instance falls between these original two. The idea is neither merely a free expression of innate capacities, nor a compensation for their obstruction or compression. Arising as the effect of a disharmony, it develops as an enchannelment of organic powers directed to the conversion of the disharmony into an adjustment. It does not _use up_ vital energies like the expressive idea, it is not an abortion of them, like the compensatory idea. It uses them, and is aware that it uses them--that is, it is a program of action upon the environment, of conversion of values into existences. Such an idea has the differentia of intelligence. It is creative; it actually converts nature into forms appropriate to human nature. It abolishes the Otherworld of the compensatory tradition in philosophy by incarnating it in this world; it abolishes the Otherworld of the religionist, rendered important by belittling the actual one, by restoring the working relationships between thoughts and things. This restoration develops as reconstruction of the world in fact. It consists specifically of the art and science which compose the efficacious enterprises of history and of which the actual web of our civilization is spun.

Manifest in its purity in art, it attends unconsciously both religion and philosophy, for the strands of life keep interweaving, and whatever is, in our collective being, changes and is changed by whatever else may be, that is in reach. The life of reason is initially unconscious because it can learn only by living to seek a reason for life. Once it discovers that it can become self-maintaining alone through relevance to its ground and conditions, the control which this relevance yields makes it so infectious that it tends to permeate every human institution, even religion and philosophy. Philosophy, it is true, has lagged behind even religion in relevancy, but the lagging has been due not to the intention of the philosopher but to the inherent character of the task he assumed. Both art and religion, we have seen, possess an immediacy and concreteness which philosophy lacks. Art reconstructs correlative portions of the environment for the eye, the ear, the hopes and fears of the daily life. Religion extends this reconstruction beyond the actual environment, but applies its saving technique at the critical points in the career of the group or the individual; to control the food-supply, to protect in birth, pubescence, marriage, and death. All its motives are grounded in specific instincts and needs, all its reconstructions and compensations culminate with reference to these. Philosophy, on the other hand, deals with the _whole_ nature of man and his _whole_ environment. It seeks primaries and ultimates. Its traditional task is so to define the universe as to articulate thereby a theory of life and eternal salvation. It establishes contact with reality at no individual, specific point: its reals are "real in general." It aims, in a word, to be relevant to all nature, and to express the whole soul of man. The consequence is inevitable: it forfeits relevance to everything natural; touching nothing actual, it reconstructs nothing actual. Its concretest incarnation is a dialectic design woven of words. The systems of tradition, hence, are works of art, to be contemplated, enjoyed, and believed in, but not to be acted on. For, since action is always concrete and specific, always determined to time, place, and occasion, we cannot in fact adapt ourselves to the aggregate infinitude of the environment, or that to ourselves. Something always stands out, recalcitrant, invincible, defiant. But it is just such an adaptation that philosophy intends, and the futility of the intention is evinced by the fact that the systems of tradition continue side by side with the realities they deny, and live unmixed in one and the same mind, as a picture of the ocean on the wall of a dining room in an inland town. Our operative relations to them tend always to be essentially aesthetic. We may and do believe in them in spite of life and experience, because belief in them, involving no action, involves no practical risk. Where action is a consequence of a philosophic system, the system seems to dichotomize into art and religion. It becomes particularized into a technique of living or the dogma of a sect, and so particularized it becomes radically self-conscious and an aspect of creative intelligence.

So particularized, it is, however, no longer philosophy, and philosophy has (I hope I may say this without professional bias) an inalienable place in the life of reason. This place is rationally defined for it by the discovery of its ground and function in the making of civilization; and by the perfection of its possibilities through the definition of its natural relationships. Thus, it is, in its essential historic character at least, as fine an art as music, the most inward and human of all arts. It may be, and human nature being what it is, undoubtedly will continue to be, an added item to the creations wherewith man makes his world a better place to live in, precious in that it envisages and projects the excellences and perfections his heart desires and his imagination therefore defines. So taken, it is not a substitution for the world, but an addition to it, a refraction of it through the medium of human nature, as a landscape painting by Whistler or Turner is not a substitution for the actual landscape, but an interpretation and imaginative perfection of it, more suitable to the eye of man. A system like Bergson's is such a work, and its aesthetic adequacy, its beauty, may be measured by the acknowledgment it receives and the influence it exercises. Choosing one of the items of experience as its medium, and this item the most precious in the mind's eye which the history of philosophy reveals, it proceeds to fabricate a dialectical image of experience in which all the compensatory desiderates are expressed and realized. It entices minds of all orders, and they are happy to dwell in it, for the nonce realizing in the perception of the system the values it utters. By abandoning all pretense to be true, philosophic systems of the traditional sort may attain the simple but supreme excellence of beauty, and rest content therewith.

The philosophic ideal, however, is traditionally not beauty but truth: the function of a philosophic system is not presentative, but _re_presentative and causal, and that the systems of tradition have had and still have consequences as well as character, is obvious enough. It is, however, to be noted that these consequences have issued out of the fact that the systems have been specific items of existence among other equally and even more specific items, thought by particular men, at particular times and in particular places. As such they have been programs for meeting events and incarnating values; operative ideals aiming to recreate the world according to determined standards. They have looked forward rather than backward, have tacitly acknowledged the reality of change, the irreducible pluralism of nature, and the genuineness of the activities, oppugnant or harmonizing, between the items of the Cosmic. Many they ostensibly negate. The truth, in a word, has been experimental and prospective; the desiderates they uttered operated actually as such and not as already existing. Historians of philosophy, treating it as if it had no context, have denied or ignored this role of philosophy in human events, but historians of the events themselves could not avoid observing and enregistering it.

Only within very recent years, as an effect of the concept of evolution in the field of the sciences, have philosophers as such envisaged this non-aesthetic aspect of philosophy's ground and function in the making of civilization and have made it the basis for a sober vision which may or may not have beauty, but which cannot have finality. Such a vision is again nothing more than traditional philosophy become conscious of its character and limitations and shorn of its pretense. It is a program to execute rather than a metaphysic to rest in. Its procedure is the procedure of all the arts and sciences. It frankly acknowledges the realities of immediate experience, the turbulence and complexity of the flux, the interpenetrative confusion of orders, the inward self-diversification of even the simplest thing, which "change" means, and the continual emergence of novel entities, unforeseen and unprevisible, from the reciprocal action of the older aggregate. This perceptual reality it aims to remould according to the heart's desire. Accordingly it drops the pretense of envisaging the universe and devotes itself to its more modest task of applying its standards to a particular item that needs to be remade. It is believed in, but no longer without risk, for, without becoming a dogma, it still subjects itself to the tests of action. So it acknowledges that it must and will itself undergo constant modification through the process of action, in which it uses events, in their meanings rather than in their natures, to map out the future and to make it amenable to human nature. Philosophy so used is, as John Dewey somewhere says, a mode and organ of experience among many others. In a world the very core of which is change, it is directed upon that which is not yet, to previse and to form its character and to map out the way of life within it. Its aim is the liberation and enlargement of human capacities, the enfranchisement of man by the actual realization of values. In its integrate character therefore, it envisages the life of reason and realizes it as the art of life. Where it is successful, beauty and use are confluent and identical in it. It converts sight into insight. It infuses existence with value, making them one. It is the concrete incarnation of Creative Intelligence.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The word relation suffers from ambiguity. I am speaking here of _connexion_, dynamic and functional interaction. "Relation" is a term used also to express logical reference. I suspect that much of the controversy about internal and external relations is due to this ambiguity. One passes at will from existential connexions of things to logical relationship of terms. Such an identification of existences with _terms_ is congenial to idealism, but is paradoxical in a professed realism.

[2] There is some gain in substituting a doctrine of flux and interpenetration of psychical states, _a la_ Bergson, for that of rigid discontinuity. But the substitution leaves untouched the fundamental misstatement of experience, the conception of experience as directly and primarily "inner" and psychical.

[3] Mathematical science in its formal aspects, or as a branch of formal logic, has been the empirical stronghold of rationalism. But an empirical empiricism, in contrast with orthodox deductive empiricism, has no difficulty in establishing its jurisdiction as to deductive functions.

[4] It is a shame to devote the word idealism, with its latent moral, practical connotations, to a doctrine whose tenets are the denial of the existence of a physical world, and the psychical character of all objects--at least as far as they are knowable. But I am following usage, not attempting to make it.

[5] See Dr. Kallen's essay, below.

[6] The "they" means the "some" of the prior sentence--those whose realism is epistemological, instead of being a plea for taking the facts of experience as we find them without refraction through epistemological apparatus.

[7] It is interesting to note that some of the realists who have assimilated the cognitive relation to other existential relations in the world (instead of treating it as an unique or epistemological relation) have been forced in support of their conception of knowledge as a "presentative" or spectatorial affair to extend the defining features of the latter to all relations among things, and hence to make all the "real" things in the world pure "simples," wholly independent of one another. So conceived the doctrine of external relations appears to be rather the doctrine of complete externality of _things_. Aside from this point, the doctrine is interesting for its dialectical ingenuity and for the elegant development of assumed premises, rather than convincing on account of empirical evidence supporting it.

[8] In other words, there is a general "problem of error" only because there is a general problem of evil, concerning which see Dr. Kallen's essay, below.

[9] Compare the paper by Professor Bode.

[10] As the attempt to retain the epistemological problem and yet to reject idealistic and relativistic solutions has forced some Neo-realists into the doctrine of isolated and independent simples, so it has also led to a doctrine of Eleatic pluralism. In order to maintain the doctrine the subject makes no difference to anything else, it is held that _no_ ultimate real makes any difference to anything else--all this rather than surrender once for all the genuineness of the problem and to follow the lead of empirical subject-matter.

[11] There is almost no end to the various dialectic developments of the epistemological situation. When it is held that all the relations of the type in question are cognitive, and yet it is recognized (as it must be) that many such "transformations" go unremarked, the theory is supplemented by introducing "unconscious" psychical modifications.

[12] Conception-presentation has, of course, been made by many in the history of speculation an exception to this statement; "pure" memory is also made an exception by Bergson. To take cognizance of this matter would, of course, accentuate, not relieve, the difficulty remarked upon in the text.

[13] Cf. _Studies in Logical Theory_, Chs. I and II, by Dewey; also "Epistemology and Mental States," Tufts, _Phil. Rev._, Vol. VI, which deserves to rank as one of the early documents of the "experimental" movement.

[14] Cf. "The Definition of the Psychical," G. H. Mead, _Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago_.

[15] Cf. _The Logic of Hegel-Wallace_, p. 117.

[16] _Bosanquet's Logic_, 2nd Ed., p. 171. The identification of induction and procedure by hypothesis occurs on p. 156.

[17] _Ibid._, p. 14 (italics mine).

[18] Perhaps the most complete exhibition of the breakdown of formal logic considered as an account of the operation of thought apart from its subject-matter is to be found in Schiller's _Formal Logic_.

[19] Cf. Stuart on "Valuation as a Logical Process" in _Studies in Logical Theory_.

[20] _The New Realism_, pp. 40-41.

[21] Cf. Montague, pp. 256-57; also Russell, _The Problems of_ _Philosophy_, pp. 27-65-66, _et passim_; and Holt's _Concept of Consciousness_, pp. 14ff., discussed below.

[22] Cf. Angell, "Relations of Psychology to Philosophy," _Decennial Publications of University of Chicago_, Vol. III; also Castro, "The Respective Standpoints of Psychology and Logic," _Philosophic Studies, University of Chicago_, No. 4.

[23] I am here following, in the main, Professor Holt because he alone appears to have had the courage to develop the full consequences of the premises of analytic logic.

[24] _The Concept of Consciousness_, pp. 14-15.

[25] It is interesting to compare this onlooking act with the account of consciousness further on. As "psychological" this act of onlooking must be an act of consciousness. But consciousness is a cross-section or a projection of things made by their interaction with a nervous system. Here consciousness is a function of all the interacting factors. It is in the play. It _is_ the play. It is not in a spectator's box. How can consciousness be a function of all the things put into the cross-section and yet be a mere beholder of the process? Moreover, what is it that makes any particular, spectacle, or cross-section "logical"? If it be said all are "logical" what significance has the term?

[26] Cf. Russell's _Scientific Methods in Philosophy_, p. 59.

[27] Holt, _op. cit._, pp. 128-30.

[28] In fact, Newton, in all probability, had the Cartesian pure notions in mind.

[29] Holt, _op. cit._, p. 118 (italics mine). Cf. also Perry's _Present Philosophical Tendencies_, pp. 108 and 311.

[30] The character of elements and the nature of simplicity have been discussed in the preceding section.

[31] _Ibid._, p. 275.

[32] _Ibid._, p. 275.

[33] This lack of continuity between the cognitive function of the nervous system and its other functions accounts for the strange paradox in the logic of neo-realism of an act of knowing which is "subjective" and yet is the act of so palpably an objective affair as a nervous system. The explanation is that the essence of all deprecated subjectivity is, as before pointed out, functional isolation. That this sort of subjectivity should be identified with the "psychical" is not strange, since a living organism is very difficult to isolate, while the term "psychical," in its metaphysical sense, seems to stand for little else than just this complete isolation. Having once appealed to the nervous system it seems incredible that the physiological continuity of its functions with each other and with its environment should not have suggested the logical corollary. Only the force of the prepossession of mathematical atomism in analytic logic can account for its failure to do so.

[34] But it would be better to use the term "logically-practical" instead of "subjective" with the psychical implications of that term.

[35] An analysis which has been many times carried out has made it clear that scientific data never do more than approximate the laws and entities upon which our science rests. It is equally evident that the forms of these laws and entities themselves shift in the reconstructions of incessant research, or where they seem most secure could consistently be changed, or at least could be fundamentally different were our psychological structure or even our conventions of thought different. I need only refer to the _Science et Hypothese_ of Poincare and the _Problems of Science_ of Enriques. The positivist who undertakes to carry the structure of the world back to the data of observation, and the uniformities appearing in the accepted hypotheses of growing sciences cannot maintain that we ever succeed in isolating data which must remain the same in the kaleidoscope of our research science; nor are we better served if we retreat to the ultimate elements of points and instants which our pure mathematics assumes and implicitly defines, and in connection with which it has worked out the modern theory of the number and continuous series, its statements of continuity and infinity.

[36] In other words, science assumes that every error is _ex post facto_ explicable as a function of the real conditions under which it really arose. Hence, "consciousness," set over against Reality, was not its condition.

[37] C. Judson Herrick, "Some Reflections on the Origin and Significance of the Cerebral Cortex," _Journal of Animal Behavior_, Vol. III, pp. 228-233.

[38] _Psychology_, Vol. I, p. 256.

[39] H. C. Warren, _Psychological Review_, Vol. XXI, Page 93.

[40] _Principles of Psychology_, I, p. 241, note.

[41] _Ibid._, p. 258.

[42] _Psychology. Briefer Course._ P. 468.

[43] Angell, _Psychology_, p. 65.

[44] _Psychology_, Vol. I, p. 251.

[45] Thorstein Veblen: _The Instinct of Workmanship_, p. 316.

[46] It may still be argued that we must depend upon analogy in our acceptance or rejection of a new commodity. For any element of novelty must surely suggest something to us, must _mean_ something to us, if it is to attract or repel. Thus, the motor-car will whirl us rapidly over the country, the motor-boat will dart over the water without effort on our part. And in such measure as we have had them hitherto, we have always enjoyed experiences of rapid motion. These new instruments simply promise a perfectly well-known _sort_ of experience in fuller measure. So the argument may run. And our mental process in such a case may accordingly be held to be nothing more mysterious than a passing by analogy from the _old_ ways in which we got rapid motion in the past to the _new_ way which now promises more of the same. And more of the same is what we want.

"More of the same" means here intensive magnitude and in this connection at all events it begs the question. Bergson's polemic seems perfectly valid against such a use of the notion. But kept in logical terms the case seems clearer. It is said that we reason in such a case by "analogy." We do, indeed; but what is analogy? The term explains nothing until the real process behind the term is clearly and realistically conceived. What I shall here suggest holds true, I think, as an account of analogical inference generally and not simply for the economic type of case we have here to do with. Reasoning is too often thought of as proceeding from given independent premises--as here (1) the fact that hitherto the driving we have most enjoyed and the sailing we have most enjoyed have been _fast_ and (2) the fact that the motor-car is _fast_. But do we accept the conclusion because the premises suggest it in a way we cannot resist? On the contrary, stated thus, the premises clearly do _not_ warrant the conclusion that the motor-car will be enjoyable. Such a statement of the premises is wholly formal and _ex post facto_. What, then, is our actual mental process in the case? The truth is, I think, that we simply--yes, "psychologically"--wish to try _that promised unheard-of rate of speed_! That comes first and foremost. But we mean to be reasonably prudent on the whole, although we are avowedly adventurous just now in this particular direction! We, therefore, ransack our memory for _other fast things_ we have known, to see whether they have encouragement to give us. We try to supply ourselves with a major premise because the new proposal in its own right interests us--instead of having the major premise already there to coerce us by a purely "logical" compulsion as soon as we invade its sphere of influence. And confessedly, in point of "logic," there is no such compulsion in the second figure: there is only a timid and vexatious neutrality, a mere "not proven."

Why, then, do we in fact take the much admired "inductive leap," in seeming defiance of strict logic? Why do we close our eyes to logic, turn our back upon logic, behave as if logic were not and had never been? In point of fact, we do nothing of the sort. The "inductive leap" is no leap away from logic, but the impulsion of logic's mainspring seen only in its legitimate event. Because we have not taken care to see the impulse coming, it surprises us and we are frightened. And we look about for an illusive assurance in some "law of thought," or some question-begging "universal premise" of Nature's "uniformity." We do not see that we were already conditionally committed to the "leap" by our initial interest. Getting our premises together is no hurried forging of a chain to save us from our own madness in the nick of time. We are only hoping to rid ourselves of an excess of conservative ballast. To reason by analogy is not to repress or to dispense with the interest in the radically novel, but to give methodical and intelligent expression to that interest.

[47] Aristotle's _Nicomachaean Ethics_ (Welldon's transl.), Book VIII.

[48] Cf. Aristotle's _Politics_ (Jowett's trans.) III. 9. Sec.6 ff. and elsewhere; _Nicom. Ethics_, I, Chap. III (end).

[49] Cf. Veblen: _op. cit._

[50] W. McDougall in his _Social Psychology_ (Ed. 1912, pp. 358 ff.) recognizes "incomplete anticipation of the end of action" as a genuine type of preliminary situation in human behavior, but appears to regard this as in so far a levelling-down of man to the blindness of the "brutes." But "incompleteness" is a highly ambiguous term and seems here to beg the question. "Incompleteness" may be given an emphasis in which it imports conjecture and hypothesis--almost anything, in fact, but blindness. Rather do the brutes get levelled up to man by such facts as those McDougall cites.

[51] take _routine_ to be the essence and meaning of hedonism. There are two fundamental types of conduct--routine and constructiveness. Reference may be made here to Boehm-Bawerk's pronouncement on hedonism in _Kapital und Kapitalzins_, 1912 (II-2, pp. 310 ff.): "What people love and hate, strive towards or fight off--whether only pleasure and pain or other 'lovable' and 'hatable' things as well,--is a matter of entire indifference to the economist. The only thing important is that they do love and hate certain things.... The deductions of marginal utility theory lose no whit of their cogency even if certain ends (dependent for their realization upon a supply of goods inadequate to the fulfillment of all ends without limit) are held to have the character not of pleasure but of something else. The marginal utility may be a least pleasure or a competing least utility of some other sort...." (p. 317). This is a not uncommon view. As W. C. Mitchell has suggested, it is too obvious to be wholly convincing. (_Journ. Pol. Ec._, Vol. XVIII. "The Rationality of Economic Activity.") Veblen has made it perfectly clear that particular matters of theory are affected by the presupposition of hedonism. (_Journ. Pol. Ec._, Vol. XVII, _Quart. Journ. Econ._, Vol. XXII, p. 147 ff.) The matter is too complex for a footnote, but I think it of little consequence whether "pleasure" be in any case regarded as substantively the end of desire or not. This is largely a matter of words. What is important is the practical question whether a thing is _so habitual with me that when the issue arises I cannot or will not give it up and take an interest in something new_ the "utility" of which I cannot as yet be cognizant of because it partly rests with me to create it. If this is the fact it will surely look as if pleasure or the avoidance of pain were my end in the case. Hedonism and egoism are in the end convertible terms. There is conduct wearing the outward aspect of altruism that is egotistic in fact--not because it was from the first insincere or self-delusive, but because it has become habitual and may in a crisis be held to for the sake of the satisfaction it affords. Genuine altruism, on the other hand, is a form of constructiveness.

[52] Until after this essay was finished I had not seen John A. Hobson's book entitled _Work and Wealth, A Human Valuation_ (London, 1914). My attention was first definitely called to this work by a friend among the economists who read my finished MS. late in 1915, and referred me in particular to the concluding chapter on "Social Science and Social Art." On now tardily reading this chapter I find that, as any reader will readily perceive, it distinctly anticipates, almost _verbatim_ in parts, what I have tried, with far less success, to say in the foregoing two paragraphs above. Hobson argues, with characteristic clearness and effect, for the qualitative uniqueness and the integral character of personal budgets, holding that the logic of marginality is "an entirely illusory account of the psychical process by which a man lays out his money, or his time, or his energy" (p. 331). "So far as it is true that the last sovereign of my expenditure in bread equals in utility the last sovereign of my expenditure in books, that fact proceeds not from a comparison, conscious, or unconscious, of these separate items at this margin, but from the parts assigned respectively to bread and books in the organic plan of my life. Quantitative analysis, inherently incapable of comprehending qualitative unity or qualitative differences, can only pretend to reduce the latter to quantitative differences. What it actually does is to ignore alike the unity of the whole and the qualitativeness of the parts" (p. 334). Hobson not only uses the analogy of the artist and the picture (p. 330) precisely as I have done, but offers still other illustrations of the principle that seem to me even more apt and telling. Though not indebted to him for what I have put into the above paragraphs, I am glad to be able to cite the authority of so distinguished an economist and sociologist for conclusions to which I found my own way. Other parts as well _of Work and Wealth_ (e.g.,