This general view of the logical const.i.tution of the moral experience may suggest a comparison with the fundamental doctrine of the British Intellectualist school. The Intellectualist writers were very largely guided in their expositions by the desire of refuting on the one hand Hobbes and on the other Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. Against Hobbes they wished to establish the obligatory character of the moral law entirely apart from sanction or enactment by political authority. Against the Sentimentalists they wished to vindicate its objectivity and permanence.
This twofold purpose they accomplished by holding that the morality of conduct lies in its conformity to the "objective nature of things," the knowledge of which, in its moral aspects, is logically deducible from certain moral axioms, self-evident like those of mathematics. Now this mathematical a.n.a.logy is the key to the whole position of the Intellectualist writers. By so conceiving the nature of knowledge these men seriously weakened their strong general position. Mathematics is just that species of knowledge which is most remote from and apparently independent of any reference to conduct, and the Intellectualists, by choosing it as their ideal, were thereby rendered incapable of explaining the obligatoriness of the moral law. An adequate psychology of knowledge would have obviated this difficulty in their system.
The occasion for economic judgment is given, as we have seen, in a conflict between ends not incompatible, in view of any ascertainable conditions of the agent"s nature as an empirical self, but inhibitory of each other in view of what we have described as conditions external to the agent. Thus the lawyer in our ill.u.s.tration found his plan of compromise thwarted by the existence of such sociological conditions as would make the practice of his profession, in the manner intended, impossible, and so cut off his income. Similarly the peasant in a European country finds that (for reasons which, more probably, he does not understand) he can no longer earn a living in the accustomed way, and emigrates to a country in which his capital and his physical energies may be more profitably employed. So also in the everyday lives of all of us ends and interests quite disparate, so far as any relation to each other through our psychical capacities is concerned, stand very frequently in opposition, nevertheless, and calling for adjustment. We must make a choice between amus.e.m.e.nt or intellectual pursuits or the means of aesthetic culture, on the one hand, and the common necessaries of life on the other, and the difficulty of the situation lies just in absence of any sort of "spiritual affinity" between these ends. There is no necessary ratio between the satisfaction of the common needs of life and the cultivation of the higher faculties--no ratio for which the individual can ever find a sanction in the const.i.tution of his empirical self through the direct method of ethical valuation. The common needs must have their measure of recognition, but no attempted ethical valuation of them can ever come to a result convincingly warranted to the "energetic" self by psychological conditions. The economic situation as such is in this sense (that is, from the standpoint of any recognized ethical standards) unintelligible. It is this ethical unintelligibility that often lends a genuine element of tragedy to situations which press urgently and in which the ends at issue are of great ethical moment. It is no small matter to the emigrant, for example, that he must cut the very roots by which he has grown to the sort of man he finds himself to be. His whole nature protests against this violence, and questions its necessity, though the necessity is unmistakable and it would be quite impossible for him not to act accordingly. Nevertheless, tragic as such a conflict may well be, it does not differ in any logically essential way, does not differ in its degree of strictly logical difficulty, from the ethically much less serious economic problems of our everyday life.
Now, we have already defined the economic act for which economic judgment is preparatory as being, in general terms, the diversion of certain means from a present use to which they have been devoted to a new use which has come to seem in a general way desirable.[145] Thus, in the cases just mentioned, the lawyer contemplates the virtual purchase of his new career by the income which his profession might in years to come afford him, the emigrant seeks a better market for his labor, and the pleasure-seeker and the ambitious student and the buyer of a commodity in the market propose to themselves, each one, the diversion from some hitherto intended use of a sum of money. Manifestly it is immaterial from our logical point of view whether the means in question which one proposes to apply in some new way are in the nature of physical and mental strength, or materials and implements of manufacture ready to be used, or means of purchase of some sort wherewith the desired service or commodity may be obtained at once. The economic problem, to state it technically, is the problem of the _reapplicability of the means_, interpreting the category of means quite broadly.
In a word, then, the method of procedure adapted to the economic type of situation is that of valuation of the means, not that of direct valuation of the ends. This method is one of valuation since, like the ethical method, it is determinative of a purpose, but it accomplishes this result in its own distinctive way. The problem of our present a.n.a.lysis will accordingly be how this method of valuation of the means is able to help toward an adjustment of disparate or unrelated ends which the ethical method is inadequate to effect.
Let us a.s.sume that a vague purpose of foreign travel, for example, has presented itself in imagination, and that the preliminary stage of ethical judgment has been pa.s.sed through, with the result that the purpose, in a more definite form than it could have at first, is now ready for economic consideration. In the first place the cost of the journey must be determined, and this step, in terms of our present point of view, is simply a methodological device whereby certain ends which the standards involved in the stage of ethical judgment could not suggest or could not effectually take into co-operation with themselves in their determination of the end are brought into play. Ascertaining the means suggests these disparate ends, these established modes of use of the means, with the result that the agent"s "forward tendency" is checked. Shall the necessary sums be spent in foreign travel or shall they be spent in the present ways--in providing various physical necessities and comforts, or for various forms of amus.e.m.e.nt, or in increasing investments in business enterprises? These modes of use do not admit of ethical comparison with the plan of foreign travel, and the agent"s interest must therefore now be centered on the means.
It is in this check to the agent"s forward tendency that the logical status of the means is evinced. As merely so much money the means could only serve to further the execution of the purpose that is forming, since under the circ.u.mstances it could only prompt immediate expenditure. Like the subject in factual judgment, the means in economic judgment have their problematic aspect which as effectually hinders the desired use of them as could any palpable physical defect. This problematic aspect consists in the fact of the present established mode of use which the now-forming purpose threatens to disturb, and it is the agent"s interest in this mode of use that turns his attention to the valuation of the means.
It need hardly be pointed out that in the economic life we find situations exactly corresponding to those of "conscience and temptation"
and mechanical "pull and haul" which were discriminated in the ethical sphere and marked off from judgment properly so called. Indeed it seems reasonable to think, on general grounds of introspection, that these methods of decision (if they deserve the name) are, relatively speaking, more frequently relied upon in the economic than in the moral life. The economic method of true judgment is roundabout and more complex and more difficult than ethical, and involves a more express recourse to those abstract conceptions which for the most part are only implicitly involved in valuation of the other type. The economic type of valuation, in fact, differs from the ethical, not in an absolute or essential way, but rather in the explicitness with which it brings to light and lays bare the vital elements in valuation as such. In general, then, the economic process would seem necessarily to embrace three stages, which will first of all be enumerated and then very briefly explained and discussed. These are: (1) a preliminary consideration of the means necessary to attain the end--which must be vague and tentative, of course, for the reason that the end as imagined is so, as compared with the fulness of detail which must belong to it before it can be finally accepted; (2) a consideration of the means, as thus provisionally taken, in the light of their present devotion to other purposes, this present devotion of them being the outcome, in some degree at least, of past valuation; (3) final definition of the means with reference to the proposed use through an adjustment effected between this and the factors involved in the past valuation.
1. In the first stage as throughout, it must be carefully noted, the means are under consideration not primarily in their physical aspect, but simply as _subject to a possible redisposition_. Thus it is not money as lawful currency receivable at the steamship office for an ocean pa.s.sage, nor tools and materials and labor-power technically suitable for the production of a desired object, that is the subject of the economic judgment. The problem of redisposition would of course not be raised were the means not technically adaptable to the purpose, nor on the other hand can the means in the course of economic judgment, as a rule, escape some measure of further (factual) inquiry into their technical properties; but the standpoints are nevertheless distinct.
Again, it must be noted that the means in this first stage will be only roughly measured. The length of one"s stay abroad, the size of the house one wishes to build, the purpose whatever it may be, is still undefined--these are in fact the very matters which the process must determine--and in the first instance it is "money in general" or "a large sum of money" with reference to which we raise the economic problem. The category of quant.i.ty is in fact essentially an economic one; it is essentially a standpoint for determining the means of action in such a way as to facilitate their economic valuation. The reader familiar with the writings of the Austrian school of economists will easily recall how uniformly in their discussions of the principle of marginal utility these writers a.s.sume outright in the first place the division of the stock of goods into definite units, and then raise the question of how the value of a unit is measured. The stock contains already a hundred bushels of wheat or ten loaves of bread--apparently as a matter of metaphysical necessity--whereas in fact the essential economic problem is this very one of how "wheat at large" comes to be put in sacks of a certain size and "bread in general" to be baked in twelve-ounce loaves. The subdivision of the stock and the valuation of the unit are not successive stages, but inseparably correlative phases of the valuation-process as a whole. The outcome may be stated either way, in accordance with one"s interest in the situation.
2. But the unmeasured means as redisposable in an as yet undetermined way bring to consciousness established measured uses to which the means have been heretofore a.s.signed in definite amounts. In this way the process of determining a definite quantum as redisposable (which is to say, of attaining to a definite acceptable plan of conduct) can begin.
How, then, does this fact of past a.s.signment to uses still recognized as desirable figure in the situation? In the first place the past a.s.signment may have been (1) an outcome of past economic valuation, (2) an unhesitating or non-economic act executive of an ethical decision, or (3) an act of more or less conscious obedience to "conscience" or "authority." In either case it now stands as a course of conduct which at the time was, in the way explained above, _sanctioned_ to the agent, to the "energetic" self, by the means and conditions recognized as bearing upon it. In this sense, then, we have, in this recognition of the past adjustment and of the economic character which the means now have in virtue of it, what we may term a judgment of "energy-equivalence" between the means and their established uses. For to the agent it was the essential meaning of the sense of sanction felt when the means were a.s.signed to these uses that the "energetic" self would on the whole be furthered thereby--and this in view of all the sacrifices that this use would entail, or in view of the sacrifices required for the production of the means, if the case were one in which the means were not at hand and could only be secured by a more or less extended production process.
In the ill.u.s.tration we have been considering, it will be observed, there is an extensive schedule of present uses which the new project calls in question and from which the means must be diverted. This is in fact the commoner case. A new use of money will affect, as a rule, not simply a single present mode of expenditure, but will very probably involve a readjustment throughout the whole schedule of expenditure which our separate past valuations of money have in effect co-operated in establishing. So likewise if we wish to use part of a store of building materials or of food, or of any other subdivisible commodity, we encounter an ordered system of consumption rather than a single predetermined use which we have not yet enjoyed. Where this is the case the whole process of valuation is greatly facilitated, but this is not essential. The means in cases of true economic valuation may be capable of but a single use, like a railroad ticket or a perishable piece of fruit, or of a virtually endless series of uses, like a painting or a literary masterpiece. Whether the means figure as representing but a single use or stand for the conservation of an extensive system, their economic significance is the same. They are the "energy-equivalent" of this use or system of uses considered as an act or system of acts of consumption in furtherance of the self. Their past a.s.signment meant then and means now simply this, that the "energetic" self would thereby gain more than it would lose through the inevitable sacrifices. This is the economic significance of the means in virtue of which they are now problematic to the extent of checking, for a time at least, forward tendency toward the desired end.[146]
3. The judgment of energy-equivalence, then, defines the inhibiting economic aspect of the means, and moreover defines it for the means as subdivided and set apart for a schedule of uses if this was the form of the past adjustments to which reference is made. The problem of the third stage of the process is that of "bringing subject and predicate together," as we have elsewhere expressed it--that is, of determining, in the light of the economic character of the means as just ascertained, what measure of satisfaction, if any, may be accorded to the new and as yet undefined desire. The new disposition of the means, if one is to be made, must bring to the "energetic" self a degree of furtherance and development which shall be sensibly as great as would come from the established method of consumption. The means, as economic, are means to the conservation of the old adjustment, and any new disposal of them or of any portion of them for a full or partial execution of the new purpose must make out at least as good a case. It must appear that the new disposition is not only physically possible, but also economically necessary in the light of the same principle of expansion of the self as sanctioned the disposition now in force. It must make the self in some way more efficient--whether more strong and symmetrical in body, more skilled in work, more clear of brain, or more efficient in whatever other concrete way may be desired.
Psychologically the sanction of any course of action which is taken as evidence of conformity to the general rule thus inadequately stated is the more or less strong sense of "relaxation" of attentive strain which comes with the shift of attention, in the final survey, from means to end. We may accordingly, for the sake of greater definiteness, restate in the following terms the process which has just been sketched: The ends in conflict at the outset are ends which do not sensibly bear upon each other through their dependence upon a common fund of psychical capacities or energies. They are related in the agent"s experience solely through their dependence upon a common stock of physical means, and they do not therefore admit of adjustment through the ethical type of process. The economic process consists essentially of a revival in imagination of the experiences accompanying the former disposition of the means and a re-enforcement by these of the means in their adherence to that former and still recognized disposition. If an adapted form of the new end can be imagined which will mediate a like experience of relaxation when the attention shifts from the means, thus emotionally re-enforced in their economic status, to the end as thus conceived, the means will be recognized as economically redisposable. Thus the method of valuation of the means makes possible, through appeal to the sensibly invariable experience of relaxation or a.s.surance in the outcome of judgment, a co-ordination of disparate ends which the ethical method of direct adjustment could not effect.[147]
The economic process thus presents on a.n.a.lysis the same factors as does the ethical. On the subject side we have the means--which as economic are problematic as to their reapplicability. On the predicate side we have the suggested mode of reapplication in tension against conservative ideals of application to established purposes. Just as it may be held that the general ethical predicate is that of Right or Good--that is, deserving of adoption into the system of one"s ends--so the economic predicate applied to the means as these come in the end to be defined is the general concept Reappliable. And in general the distinction of the types is not an ultimate one, for the more deliberately and rigorously the method of economic valuation is pursued--in such a case, for example, as that of the prospective emigrant--the stronger will be the agent"s sense of a genuinely ethical sanction as belonging to the decision which is in the end worked out. The more certain and sincere, therefore, will be the agent"s judgment that the means must be reapplied, for on the sense of sanction of which we speak rests the explicit judgment that the purpose formed is expansive of the self.
From the a.n.a.lysis thus presented it must appear, therefore, that the economic type of judgment is in our sense a constructive process. Its function is to determine a particular commodity or portion of a stock of some commodity in its economic character as _disposable_, and in performing this function it presents a definite reality in the economic order. Moreover, in thus defining the particular, recourse is had to more or less distinctively namable economic standards which are in the last resort symbols representing established habits of consumption in the light of which the means, _prima facie_, seem not to be available for any other purposes. These economic standards, like ethical standards and the cla.s.s concepts of science and our ordinary perceptual experience, are, with all due respect to nominalism, const.i.tutive of a real world--a world which is real because it lends form and significance to our knowledge of particulars as stimuli to conduct.
We have now before us sufficient reason for our thesis that the valuation-process in both its forms is constructive of an order of reality, and we have sufficiently explained the relation which the economic order bears to the inclusive and logically prior order of ethical objects and relations. We are now in a position to see that in being thus constructive of reality (taking the conception in its proper functional meaning) they are at the same time constructive of the self, since the reality which they construct is in its functional aspect the a.s.semblage of means and conditions, of stimuli, in short, for the development and expansion of the self. We shall bring this main division of our study to a close with a series of remarks in explanation and ill.u.s.tration of this view.
Let us consider once more the factors present in the agent"s final survey of the situation after the completion of the judgment-process and on the verge of action. These factors are, as we have seen, (1) recognition of conditions sanctioning the purpose formed, (2) recognition of the purpose as, in view of this sanction, warranted to the "energetic" self as an eligible method of expansion and development, and (3) recognition of the "energetic" self, conversely, as in possession, in virtue of the favorable conditions given in factual judgment, of this new method of furtherance. These three factors are manifestly not so much factors co-operating in the situation as inseparable aspects of it distinguishable from each other and admitting of discriminative emphasis in accordance with the degree of reflective power which the individual may possess or choose to exercise. Strictly speaking these three aspects are present in every conscious recognition of a purpose as one"s own and as presently to be carried into effect, but they are not always present in equal conspicuousness, and never with equal logical importance for the individual. In fact this enumeration of aspects coincides with our enumeration of the three stages in the evolution of the individual"s conscious moral att.i.tude toward new purposes given in impulse--in the third of which the last named of these aspects comes to the fore with the others in logical or functional subordination to it.
Now it will be apparent on grounds of logic, as on the evidence of simple introspection, that in this third type of att.i.tude--in the att.i.tude of true valuation, that is to say--the energetic self cannot be identified with the chosen purpose. The purpose is a determinate specified act to be performed subject to recognized conditions, and with the use of the co-ordinated means; the self, on the other hand, is a process to which this particular purpose is, indeed, from the standpoint of the self"s conservation and increase, indispensable, but which is nevertheless apart from the purpose in the sense that without the purpose it would still be a self, though perhaps a narrower and less developed one. Our standpoint here as elsewhere, the reader must remember, is the logical. It is the standpoint of the agent"s own interpretation of his experience of judgment during the judgment-process and at its close, and not the standpoint of the psychological mediation of this experience as a series of occurrences. Thus we are here far from wishing to deny the general proposition that a man"s purposes are an expression of his nature, as the psychologist might describe it, or the proposition that a man"s conduct and his character are one and the same thing viewed from different points of view. We wish merely to insist upon the fact that these psychological propositions are not a true account of the agent"s own experience of himself and of his purposes _while these latter are in the making or are on the verge of execution_.
There is indeed no conflict between this "inside view" of the judgment-process and of the final survey and the psychological propositions just mentioned. The ident.i.ty of conduct and character means not simply that as the man is so does he act, but quite as much, and in a more important way, that as he acts so is he and so does he become. It is, then, the essence of the agent"s own view of the situation that his character is in the making and that the purpose is the method to be taken. To the agent the self is not, indeed, independent of the purpose, for plainly it is recognized that upon just this purpose the self is, in the sense explained, in a vital way dependent. Nevertheless the self is in the agent"s apprehension essentially beyond the purpose, and larger than the purpose, and even, we may say, metaphysically apart from it.
Now the conclusion which we wish to draw from this examination of the agent"s att.i.tude in judgment is that no formulation of an ideal self can ever be adequate to his purposes, not simply because any such formulation must, as Green allows, inevitably be incomplete and inconsistent, but because the self as a process is in the agent"s own apprehension of it inherently incapable of formulation. Any formulation that might be attempted must be in terms of particular purposes (since in a modern ethical theory the self must be a "concrete" and not an abstract universal), and it is easy to see that any such would be, to the agent in the att.i.tude of true ethical judgment, worse than useless.
It could as contentual and concrete only be a composite of existing standards, more or less coherently put together, offered to the agent as a subst.i.tute for the new standard which he is trying to work out. If there were not need of a new standard there would be no judgment-process; the agent must be, to say the least, embarra.s.sed, even if the unwitting imposture does not deceive him, when such a composite, useful and indeed indispensable in its proper place as a standard of reference and a source of suggestion, is urged upon him as suitable for a purpose which in the very nature of the case it is logically incapable of serving.[148]
To the agent, then, the "energetic" self can never be represented as an ideal--can never be expressed in terms of purpose--since it is in its very nature logically incongruous with any possible particular purpose or generalization of such purposes. It is commonly imaged by the agent in some manner of sensuous terms, but it is imaged, in so far as the case is one of judgment in a proper sense, for use as a stimulus to the methodical process of valuation--not as a standard, which if really adequate would make valuation unnecessary. The agent"s consciousness of himself as "energetic" cannot be an ideal; it comes to consciousness only through the endeavor, first to follow, and then, in a later stage of moral development, to use ideals, and has for its function, as a presentation, the incitement of the process of methodical use of standards in the control of the agent"s impulsive ends. It is not an antic.i.p.atory vision of the final goal of life, but the agent"s coming to consciousness of the general impulse and movement of the life that is.
It is an inevitable consequence of acceptance of a contentual view of the "energetic" self as one"s ideal that reflective morality should tend to degenerate into an introspective conscientiousness constantly in unstable equilibrium between a pharisaical selfishness on the one hand and a morally scarcely more dangerous hypocrisy on the other. There is certainly much justice in the stinging characterization of "Neo-Hegelian Egoism" which Mr. Taylor somewhere in his unsearchable book applies to the currently prevailing conventionalized type of idealistic ethics. If the self of the valuation-process is an ultimate goal of effort, then there must certainly be an irreconcilable contrast to the disadvantage of the latter between the plain man"s objective desire for right conduct, as such, and for the welfare of his fellow-beings, and the moralist"s anxious questionings of the rect.i.tude of the motives by which his conformity to the fixed moral standard are prompted.[149] Into the value and significance of the att.i.tude of conscientious examination of one"s moral motives we are not here concerned to inquire, but need only insist, in accordance with our present view, that its value must be distinctly subordinate and incidental to the general course and outcome of the valuation-process. In the valuation-process, consciousness of self is not an object of solicitude, but simply, we repeat, a pure presentation of stimulus, having for its office the incitement, and if need be the reincitement, of the att.i.tude of deference to the suggestions of old standards and openness to the pet.i.tions of new impulse, and of methodically bringing these to bear upon each other.
The outcome of such a process, of course, cannot be predicted--and for the same reasons as make unpredictable the scientist"s factual hypothesis. Just as the scientist"s data are incomplete and ill-a.s.sorted and unorganized, for the reason that they have, of necessity, been collected, and must at the outset be interpreted, in the light of present concepts, whose inadequacy the very existence of the problem at issue demonstrates, so the final moral purpose that shall be developed is not to be deduced from any possible inventory of the situation as it stands. The process in both cases is one of reconstruction, and the test of the validity of the reconstruction must in both cases be of the same essentially practical character. In both cases the process is constructive of reality, in the functional signification of the term. In both, the judgment process is constructive also of the self, in the sense that upon the determination of the agent"s future att.i.tude the c.u.mulative outcome of his past att.i.tudes is methodically brought to bear.[150]
V
Judgments of value are, then, objective in their import in the same sense as are the factual judgments in which the conditions of action are presented. The ideal problematic situation is, in the last resort, ethical, in the sense of requiring for its solution determination of the new end that has arisen with reference to existing standards. In structure and in function the judgment in which the outcome of this process is presented is knowledge, and objective in the only valid acceptation of the term.
But, after all, it may be urged, is it not the essential mark of the objective that it should be accessible to all men, and not in the nature of the case valid for only a single individual? At best the objectivity of content which has been made out for the judgment of value is purely functional, and not such as can be verified by appeal to the consensus of other persons. The agent"s _a.s.surance_ of the reality of the economic or ethical subject-matter which he is endeavoring to determine, and his sense of the objectivity of the results which he reaches, need not be denied. These may well enough be illusions of personal prejudice or pa.s.sion, or even normal illusions of the reflective faculty, like that of interpreting the secondary qualities of bodies as objective in the same sense as are the "bulk, figure, extension, number, and motion of their solid parts."[151] Any man can see the physical object to which I point, and verify with his own eyes the qualities which I ascribe to it, but no man can either understand or verify my judgment that the purpose I have formed is in accord with rational ideals of industry and self-denial, or that this portion of my winter"s fuel may be given to a neighbor who has none.
But this line of objection proves too much, for, made consistent with itself, it really amounts to a denial that the very judgment of sense-perception, to which it appeals so confidently as a criterion, has objective import. The first division of this study was intended to show that every object in the experience of each individual is for the individual a unique construction of his own, determined in form and in details by individual interests and purposes, and therefore different from that object in the experience of any other individual which in social intercourse pa.s.ses current as the same. The real object is for me the object which functions in my experience, presenting problematic aspects for solution, and lending itself more or less serviceably to my purposes; and this object is, we hold, not the object as socially current, but the complete object which, as complete in its determination with reference to my unique purposes, cannot possibly have social currency. The objection as stated cuts away the very ground on which it rests, since the shortcoming which it finds in the judgment of ethical or economic value is present in the particular judgment of sense-perception also. The object about which I can a.s.sure myself by an immediate appeal to other persons is the object in its bare "conceptual"
aspects--the object as a dictionary might define it, the commodity as it might be described in a trade catalogue, or the ethical act as defined by the criminal code or in the treatise of a moral philosopher. It is an object consisting of a central core or fixed deposit of meaning, which renders it significant in a certain general way to a number of persons, or even to all men, but which is not yet adequately known by me from the standpoint of my present forming purpose. In virtue of these conceptual characters it is adaptable to my purpose, which is as yet general and indeterminate; but in the nature of the case it cannot yet be known to me as applicable to my prospective concrete purpose, as this shall come to be through judgment.
Thus, if the test of objectivity of import is to be that the judgment shall present an object or a fact which, as presented, is socially current among men and not shut away in the individual intelligence apart from the possibility of social verification, then the apparent nominalism of the objection we are considering turns out to be the uttermost extreme of realism. Such a test amounts to a virtual affirmation that the sole objective reality is the conceptual, and that the "accidents" of one"s particular object of sense-perception are the arbitrary play of private preference or fancy. At this point, however, the objection may shift its ground and take refuge in some such position as the following: The real object is indeed the object which the individual knows in relation to his particular purpose, and it is indeed impossible that the individual"s judgment should be limited in its content to coincidence with the conceptual elements of meaning which are socially current. The building-stone which one has judged precisely fit for a special purpose, the specimen which the mineralogist or the botanist examines under his microscope, the tool whose peculiarity of working one has learned to make allowance for in use--these all are, of course, highly individual objects, possessing for the person in question an indefinite number of objective aspects of which no other person can possibly be conscious at the time. And, more than this, even though the individual may, in his scrutiny of the object, have discovered no conspicuous new qualities in it which were not present in the socially current meaning, the object will still possess an individuality making it genuinely unique merely through its co-ordination with other objects in the mechanical process of working out the purpose in hand. It is at least an object standing here at just this time, a tool cutting this particular piece of stone and striking at this instant with this particular ringing sound, and these perhaps wholly nonessential facts will nevertheless serve to individualize the object (if one chances to think of them) in the sense of making it such a one as no other person knows. All this may be granted, the objection may allow, and yet the vital point remains; for this is not what it was intended, even in the first place, to deny. The vital point at issue is not whether the object which I know _is_ known as I know it by any other person, but whether, in the nature of things, it is one that _can_ be so known.
Herein, then, lies the difference between judgments of fact and judgments of value. The mineralogist can train his pupil to see precisely what he himself sees; and so likewise in any case of sense-perception, the object, however recondite may be the qualities or features which one may see in it, _can_ nevertheless be seen by any other person in precisely the same way on the single, more often not insuperably difficult, condition that the discoverer shall point these out or otherwise prepare the other for seeing them. But with the ton of coal which one may judge economically disposable for a charitable purpose the case stands differently, since it is not in its visible or other physical aspects that the ton of coal is here the subject of the judgment. It is as having been set apart _by oneself exclusively_ for other uses that the ton of coal now functions as an object and now possesses the character which the economic judgment has given it; and the case stands similarly with a contemplated act, of telling the truth in a trying situation. The valuation placed upon the commodity or upon the moral act depends essentially upon psychological conditions of temperament, disposition, mood, or whim into which it would be impossible for another person to enter, and these depend upon conditions of past training and native endowment which can never occur or be combined in future in precisely the same way for any other individual.
In short, the physical object is _describable_ and _can_ be made socially current, though doubtless with more or less of difficulty, if other persons will attend to it and learn to see it as I see it; but the value of an economic object or a moral act depends upon my desires and feelings, and therefore must remain a matter of my private appreciation.
In answering this amended form of the objection it is entirely unnecessary to discuss the issue of fact which it has raised as to whether or not complete description of a physical object or event is a practical or theoretical possibility. It need only be pointed out that at best such complete description can only be successful in its purpose on condition that the individual upon whom the experiment is tried be willing to attend and have the requisite "apperceptive background." The accuracy with which another person"s knowledge shall copy the knowledge which I endeavor to impart to him must manifestly depend upon these two leading conditions, not to mention also the measure of my own pedagogical and literary skill. Any consideration of such a purely psychological problem as is here suggested would be entirely out of place in a discussion the purpose of which is not that of a.n.a.lyzing the process of judgment, but that of interpreting its meaning aspects. Let us grant the entire psychological possibility of making socially current in the manner here suggested the most highly individual and concrete cognition of an object one may please, and let us grant, moreover, that this possibility has been actually realized. This concurrent testimony of the witness will doubtless confirm one"s impression of the accuracy of the process of observation and inference whereby the knowledge which has been imparted was first gained, but we must deny that it can do more than this. For indeed, apart from some independent self-reliant conviction of the objective validity of the knowledge in question, how should another"s a.s.sent be taken as _confirmation_ and not rather as evidence of one"s own mere skill in suggestion and of the other"s susceptibility thereto? We must deny that even in the improved form the criterion of social currency is a valid one. In a word, the social currency of knowledge to the extent to which it can exist requires as its condition, and is evidence of, the equal social currency of certain interests, purposes, or points of view for predication; and if it be possible to make socially current an item of concrete knowledge, with all its concrete fulness of detail, then _a fortiori_ it must be possible to make socially current the concrete individual purpose with reference to which this item of knowledge first of all took form.
Whether such a thing be psychologically possible at all the reader may decide; but if it be possible in the sphere of knowledge of fact, then it must be possible in the sphere of valuation. In short, judgment in either field, in definition of a certain object or commodity or moral act as, for the agent, an objective fact possessing certain characters, involves the tacit a.s.sumption of social verifiability as a matter of course; but it does not rest upon this a.s.sumption, nor is this a.s.sumption the essence of its meaning. To say that my judgment is socially verifiable, that my concrete object of perception or of valuation would be seen as I see it by any person in precisely my place, is merely a tautological way of formally announcing that _I have made the judgment_ and have now a definite object which to me has a certain definite functional meaning.
Thus, instead of drawing a distinction between the realms of fact and value, as between what is or can be common to all intelligent beings and what must be unique for each individual one, we must hold that the two realms are coextensive. The socially current object answers to a certain general type of conscious purpose or interest active in the individual and so to a general habit of valuation, and the concrete object to a special determination of this type of purpose with reference to others in the recognized working system of life. The agent"s final att.i.tude, on the conclusion of the judgment-process, may be expressed in either sort of judgment--in a judgment of the value of commodity or moral purpose, or in a judgment of concrete fact setting forth the "external"
conditions which warrant the purpose to the "energetic" self. Throughout the judgment-process there is a correlation between the movement whereby the socially current object develops into the adapted means and that whereby the socially current type of conduct develops into the defined and valued purpose.[152]
At this point, however, a second general objection presents itself.
However individual the content of my knowledge of physical fact may be, and however irrelevant, from the logical point of view, to my confidence in its objective validity may be the possibility of sharing it with other persons, nevertheless it refers to an object which is in some sense permanent, and therein differs from my valuations. In economic valuation I reach a definition of a certain commodity and am confirmed in it by all the conditions that enter into my final survey of the situation. But my desire for the new sort of consumption may fail, and so expose my valuation to easy attack from any new desire that may arise; or my supply of the commodity in question may be suddenly increased or diminished, and my valuation of the unit quant.i.ty thereby changed. Likewise my ethical valuation may have to be reversed (as Mr.
Taylor has insisted) by reason of a change of disposition or particular desire which makes impossible, except in obedience to some other and inclusive valuation, further adherence to it. And these changes take place without any accompanying sense of their doing violence to objective fact or, on the other hand, any judgment of their being in the nature of corrections of previous errors in valuation, and so more closely in accordance with the truth. Moreover, a new valuation, taking the place of an old, does not supplement its predecessor as one set of judgments about a physical object may supplement another, made from a different point of view, but does literally take its place, and this without necessarily condemning it as having been erroneous.
This general objection rests upon a number of fairly obvious misconceptions, and its strength is apparent only. In the first place, the question of the objectivity of any type of judgment must in the end, as we have seen, reduce itself to a question of the judgment"s import to the agent. However the agent"s valuations may shift from time to time, each several one will be sanctioned to the agent by the changed conditions exhibited in the inventory which the agent takes at the close of judgment which has formed it. The conditions have changed, and the valuation of the earlier purpose has likewise changed; but the new purpose is sanctioned by the new conditions, and the test of the presumed validity of the new valuation can only be in the manner already discussed[153] the test of actual execution of the purpose. In the change, as the agent interprets the situation, there is no violation of the former purpose nor a nearer approach to truth. Each valuation is true for the situation to which it corresponds. We are obviously not here considering the case of error. An error in valuation is evidenced to the agent, not by the need of a new valuation answering to changed conditions, but by the failure of a given valuation to make good its promise, although to all appearance conditions have remained unchanged.
If the conditions have changed, then the purpose and the conditions _must_ be redetermined, if the expansion of the "energetic" self is to continue; but the former valuation does not thereby become untrue.
These brief remarks should suffice by way of answer, but it will serve advantageously to ill.u.s.trate our general position if we pursue the objection somewhat farther. The physical object is, nevertheless, _permanent_, it will be said, and this surely distinguishes it from the object (now freely acknowledged as such) of the value-judgment. To one man gold may be soluble in _aqua regia_ and to another worth so many pence an ounce, but different and individual as are these judgments and the standpoints they respectively imply, the gold is _one_, impartially admitting at the same time of both characterizations. On the other hand, one cannot judge an act good and bad at once. The purpose of deception that may be good is one controlled and shaped by ideals quite different from those which permit deception of the evil sort--is, in truth, taken as a total act, altogether different from the purpose of deception which one condemns, and not, like the "parcel of matter" in the two judgments about gold, the subject of both valuations.
A brief consideration of the meaning of this "parcel of matter" will easily expose the weakness of the plea. In the last a.n.a.lysis the "parcel of matter" must for the agent reduce itself, let us say, to certain controllable energies centering about certain closely contiguous points in s.p.a.ce and capable, in their exercise, of setting free or checking other energies in the system of nature. Thus, put in _aqua regia_ the gold will dissolve, but in the atmosphere it retains its brilliant color, and in the photographer"s solution its energies have still a different mode of manifestation. And thus it would appear that the various predicates which are applied to "gold" imply, each one, a unique set of conditions. Gold is soluble in _aqua regia_, but not if it is to retain its yellow l.u.s.ter; which predicate is to be true of it depends upon the conditions under which the energies "resident in the gold" are to be set free, just as the moral character of an act depends upon the social conditions obtaining at the time of its performance--that is, upon the ideals with reference to which it has been shaped in judgment.
How can one maintain that in a literal and concrete physical sense gold in process of solution is the "same" as gold entering into chemical combination? Surely the energy conditions which const.i.tute the "gold" in the two processes are not the same--and can one nowadays hope to find sameness in unchangeable atoms?[154]
In a word, the permanent substance or "real essence" that admits of various mutually supplementary determinations corresponding to diverse points of view is, strictly speaking, a convenient abstraction, and not an existent fact in time--and we shall maintain that the same species of abstraction has its proper place, and in fact occurs, in the sphere of moral judgment. The type of moral conduct that in every actual case of its occurrence in the moral order is determined in some unique and special way by relation to other standards is precisely a.n.a.logous to the "substance" that is now dissolved in _aqua regia_ and now made to pa.s.s in the form of current coin, but cannot be treated in both ways at once.
Both are abstractions. The "gold" is a name for the general possibility of attaining any one of a certain set of particular ends by appropriately co-ordinating certain energies, resident elsewhere in the physical system, with those at present stored in this particular "parcel of matter;" the result to be attained depends not alone upon the "parcel of matter," but also upon the particular energies brought to bear upon it from without. Now let us take a type of conduct which is sometimes judged good and sometimes bad. Deception, for example, is such a type--and as a type it simply stands for the general possibility of furtherance or detriment to the "energetic" self according as it is determined in the concrete instance by ideals of social well-being or by considerations of immediate personal advantage.
For the type-form of conduct--when considered, not as a type of mere physical performance, but as conduct in the technical sense of a possible purpose of the self--is, in the sense we have explained, a symbol for the general possibility of access or dissipation of spiritual energy--energy which must be set free by the bringing to bear of other energies upon it, and which furthers or works counter to the enlargement and development of the self according to the mode of its co-ordination with other energies which the self has already turned to its purposes.[155] But actual conduct is concrete always and never typical; and so likewise, we have sought to show, actual "substance," the objective thing referred to in the factual judgment, is always concrete and never an essence. It is not a fixed thing admitting of a simultaneous variety of conflicting determinations and practical uses, but absolutely unique and already determined to its unique character by the whole a.s.semblage of physical conditions which affect it at the time and which it in turn reacts upon. In the moral as in the physical sphere the fundamental category would, on our present account, appear to be that of energy. The particular physical object given in judgment is a concrete realization, in the form of a particular means or instrument, of that general possibility of attaining ends which the concept of a fixed fund of energy, interpreted as a logical postulate or principle of inference, expresses. The particular moral or economic act is a particular way in which the energy of the self may be increased or diminished. In both spheres the reality presented in the finished judgment is objective as being a stimulus to the setting free of the energies for which it stands. Once more, then, our answer to the objection we have been considering must be that the object as the permanent substrate is merely an abstract symbol standing for the indeterminate means in general set over against the self. Corresponding to it we have, on the other side, the concept of the "energetic"
self--the self that is purposive in general, expansive somehow or other.
The function of completed factual judgment in the development of experience is, we have held, that of warranting to the agent the completed purpose which his judgment of value expresses. This view calls for some further comment and ill.u.s.tration in closing the present division. In the first place the statement implies that the conditions which factual judgment presents in the "final survey" as sanctioning the purpose have not _determined_ the purpose, since prior to the determination of the purpose the conditions were not, and could not be, so presented. The question, therefore, naturally arises whether our meaning is that in the formation of our purposes in valuation the recognition of existing conditions plays no part. Our answer can be indicated only in the barest outline as follows:
The agent must, of course, in an economic judgment-process, recognize and take account of such facts as the technical adaptability of the means he is proposing to use to the new purpose that is forming, as also of environing conditions which may affect the success which he may meet with in applying them. He must consider also his own physical strength and qualities of mind with a view to this same technical problem. And similarly in ethical valuation, as we have seen, the psychology of the "empirical ego" must play its part. But the conditions thus recognized are, as we might seek to show more in detail, explainable as the outcome of past factual judgment-processes, and on the occasion of their original definition in the form in which they now are known played the sanctioning part of which we have so often spoken. They therefore correspond to the agent"s accepted practical ideals, so that the control which his past experience exercises over his present conduct may be stated equally well in either sort of terms--in terms of his prevailing recognized standards, or in terms of his present knowledge of the conditions which his new purpose must respect. Thus, in general, the concept of a physical order conditioning the conduct of all men and presented in a definite body of socially current knowledge is the logical correlate of the moral law conceived as a categorical imperative prescribing certain types of conduct.
Thus the error of regarding the agent"s conduct in a present emergency as an outcome of existing determining conditions is logically identical with the corresponding error of the ethical theory of self-realization.
The latter holds the logical possibility of a determinate descriptive ideal (already realized in the unchanging Absolute Self) which is adequate to the solution of all possible ethical problems. The former holds that all conduct must be subject to the determining force of external conditions which, if not at present completely known, are at least in theory knowable. The physical universe in its original nebulous state contained the "promise and potency" of all that has been in the way of human conduct and of all that is to be. Into the fixed mechanical system no new energy can enter and from it none of the original fund of energy can be lost. This mechanical theory of conduct is the essential basis of the hedonistic theory of ethics; and it would not be difficult to show that Green"s criticism of this latter and his own affirmative theory of the moral ideal (as also the current conventional criticism of hedonism in the same tenor by the school of Green) are in a logical sense identical with it. For the a.s.sumption that conduct is determined by existing objective conditions is precisely the logical correlate of the concept of a contentual and "realizable" ideal moral self.[156]
We may now interpret, in the light of our general view of the function of factual judgment, the concept of the "empirical self" referred to in our discussion of the various types of sanctioning condition which may enter into the "final survey." The "empirical self" of psychological science is a construction gradually put together by psychologist or introspective layman as an interpretation of the way in which accepted concrete modes of conduct, in the determination of which standards have been operative, have worked out in practice to the furtherance or impoverishment of the "energetic" self. We have seen that the ambiguous presented self which functions in the moral att.i.tude of obedience to authority or to conscience gives place in the att.i.tude of conscious valuation to apprehension of the "energetic" self, on the one hand, and descriptive concepts of particular types of conduct, on the other. The "empirical self" at the same time makes its appearance as a constantly expanding inventory of the "spiritual resources" which the "energetic"
self has at its disposal. These are the functions of the soul which a functional psychology shows us in operation--powers of attention, strength of memory, fertility in a.s.sociative recall, and the like--and these are the resources wherewith the "energetic" self may execute, and so exploit to its own furtherance, the purposes which, in particular emergencies, new end and recognized standards may work out in co-operation.[157]