somewhere between these limits. But how? "Here..." we read, "is room for any amount of 'higgling.' According as in the conduct of the transaction the buyer or the seller shows the greater dexterity, cunning, obstinacy, power-of-persuasion, or such like, will the price be forced either to its lower or to its upper limit."[61] But the higgling cannot touch the underlying attitudes. Even "power of persuasion" is only one part of "skill in bargaining," with all the rest and like all the rest; if it were more than this there would be for Boehm-Bawerk no theoretically grounded price limits to define the range of accidental settlement and the whole explanation, as a theory of price, would reduce to nullity.[62] With this, then, appears to fall away all ground for a one-sided, or even a sharply two-sided, conception of the process of fixation of market-values. A "marginal utility" theory and a "cost of production" theory of market price alike assume that the factor chosen as the ultimate determinant is a fixed fact defined by conditions which the actual spatial and temporal meeting-together of buyers and sellers in the market cannot affect. In this logical sense, the chosen determinant is in each case an ante-market or extra-market fact and the same is true of the blades of Marshall's famous pair of scissors.
The price of a certain article let us say is $5. According to the current type of analysis this is the price because, intending buyers' and sellers' valuations of the article being just what they are, it is at this figure that the largest number of exchanges can occur. Were the price higher there would be more persons willing to sell than to buy; were it lower there would be more persons willing to buy than to sell.
At $5 no buyer or seller who means what he says about his valuation when he enters the market goes away disappointed or dissatisfied. With this price established all sellers whose costs of production prevent their conforming to it must drop out of the market; so must all buyers whose desire for the article does not warrant their paying so much. More fundamentally then, Why is $5 the price? Is it because intending buyers and the marginal buyer in particular do not desire the article more strongly? Or is it because conditions of production, all things considered, do not permit a lower marginal unit cost? The argument might seem hopeless. But the advantage is claimed for the principle of demand.
Without demand arising out of desires expressive of wants there would simply _be_ no value, no production, and no price. Demand evokes production and sanctions cost. But cost expended can give no value to a product that no one wants.
Does it follow, however, that the cost of a commodity in which on its general merits I have come to take a hypothetical interest can in no wise affect my actual price-offer for it? Can it contribute nothing to the preciser definition of my interest which is eventually to be expressed in a price offer? If the answer is "No, for how can this external fact affect the strength of your desire for the object?"--then the reason given begs the question at issue. _Is_ my interest in the object an interest in the object alone? And _is_ the cost of the object a fact for me external and indifferent? It is, at all events, not uncommon to be assured that an article "cannot be produced for less," that one or another of its elements of cost is higher than would be natural to suppose. Not always scientifically accurate, such assurances express an evident confidence that they will not be without effect upon a hesitant but fair-minded purchaser. And in other ways as well, the position of sellers in the market is not so defenseless as a strict utility theory of price conceives--apart from the standpoint of an abstract "normality" that can never contrive to get itself realized in empirical fact.[63] It is true that, in general, one tends to purchase an article of a given familiar kind where its price, all things considered, is lowest. In consequence the less "capable" producers or sellers must go to the wall. But the fact seems mainly "regulative" and of subordinate importance. Is it equally certain that as between branches of expenditure, such as clothing, food, and shelter, children, books, and "social" intercourse, the shares of income we expend upon them or the marginal prices we are content to pay express the original strength of separate and unmodified extra-market interests? On the contrary we have paid in the past what we have had to pay, what we have deemed just and reasonable, what we have been willing experimentally to hazard upon the possibility of the outlay's proving to have been worth while. In these twilight-zones of indetermination, cost as well as other factors of supply have had their opportunity. Shall we nevertheless insist that our "demands" are _ideally_ fixed, even though in fallible human fact they are more or less indistinct, yielding and modifiable? On the contrary they are "in principle and for the most part" indeterminate and expectant of suggested experimental shaping from the supply side of the market. It is less in theory than in fact that they have a salutary tendency (none too dependable) toward rigidity.
CONCLUSION Sec. 19. The argument may now be summarily reviewed.
I. How are we to understand the acquisition, by an individual, of what are called new economic needs and interests? Except by a fairly obvious fallacy of retrospection we cannot regard this phenomenon as a mere arousal of so-called latent or implicit desires. New products and new means of production afford "satisfactions" and bring about objective results which are unimaginable and therefore unpredictable, in any descriptive fashion, in advance. In a realistic or empirical view of the matter, these constitute genuinely new developments of personality and of social function, not mere unfoldings of a preformed logical or vital system. "Human nature" is modifiable and economic choice and action are factors in this indivisible process (Sec.Sec. 2-4). Now "logically" it would seem clear that unless a new commodity is an object of desire it will not be made or paid for. On the other hand, with equal "logic," a _new_ commodity, it would seem, _cannot_ be an object of desire because all desire must be for what we already know. We seem confronted with a complete _impasse_ (Sec. 5). But the _impasse_ is conceptual only. We have simply to acknowledge the patent fact of our recognition of the new as novel and our interest in the new in its outstanding character of novelty. We need only express and interpret this fact, instead of fancying ourselves bound to explain it away. It is an interest not less genuine and significant in economic experience than elsewhere (Sec.Sec. 6, 7).
Its importance lies in the fact that it obliges us to regard what is called economic choice not as a balancing of utilities, marginal or otherwise, but as a process of "constructive comparison." The new commodity and its purchase price are in reality symbols for alternatively possible systems of life and action. Can the old be relinquished for the new? Before this question is answered each system may be criticized and interpreted from the standpoint of the other, each may be supplemented by suggestion, by dictate of tradition and by impulsive prompting, by inference, and by conjecture. Finally in experimental fashion an election must be made. The system as accepted may or may not be, in terms, identical with one of the initial alternatives; it can never be identical in full meaning and perspective with either one. And in the end we have not chosen the new because its value, as seen beforehand, measured more than the value of the old, but we now declare the old, seen in retrospect, to have been worth less (Sec.Sec.
8-12). There are apparently no valid objections to this view to be drawn from the current logical type of marginal-utility analysis (Sec. 13).
II. Because so-called economic "choice" is in reality "constructive comparison" it must be regarded as essentially ethical in import. Ethics and economic theory, instead of dealing with separate problems of conduct, deal with distinguishable but inseparable stages belonging to the complete analysis of most, if not all, problems (Sec. 14). This view suggests, (_a_) that no reasons in experience or in logic exist for identifying the economic interest with an attitude of exclusive or particularistic egoism (Sec. 15), and (_b_) that social reformers are justified in their assumption of a certain "perfectibility" in human nature--a constructive responsiveness instead of an insensate and stubborn inertia (Sec. 16). Again, in the process of constructive comparison in its economic phase, Price or Exchange Value is, in apparent accord with the English classical tradition, the fundamental working conception. Value as "absolute" is essentially a subordinate and "conservative" conception, belonging to a status of system and routine, and is "absolute" in a purely functional sense (Sec. 17). And finally constructive comparison, with price or exchange value as its dominant conception, is clearly nothing if not a market process. In the nature of the case, then, there can be no such ante-market definiteness and rigidity of demand schedules as a strictly marginal-utility theory of market prices logically must require (Sec. 18).
Sec. 20. In at least two respects the argument falls short of what might be desired. No account is given of the actual procedure of constructive comparison and nothing like a complete survey of the leading ideas and problems of economic theory is undertaken by way of verification. But to have supplied the former in any satisfactory way would have required an unduly extended discussion of the more general, or ethical, phases of constructive comparison. The other deficiency is less regrettable, since the task in question is one that could only be hopefully undertaken and convincingly carried through by a professional economist.
For the present purpose, it is perhaps enough to have found in our economic experience and behavior the same interest in novelty that is so manifest in other departments of life, and the same attainment of new self-validating levels of power and interest, through the acquisition and exploitation of the novel. In our economic experience, no more than elsewhere, is satisfaction an ultimate and self-explanatory term.
Satisfaction carries with it always a reference to the level of power and interest that makes it possible and on which it must be measured. To seek satisfaction for its own sake or to hinge one's interest in science or art upon their ability to serve the palpable needs of the present moment--these, together, make up the meaning of what is called Utilitarianism. And Utilitarianism in this sense (which is far less what Mill meant by the term than a tradition he could never, with all his striving, quite get free of), this type of Utilitarianism spells routine. It is the surrender of initiative and control, in the quest for ends in life, for a philistine pleased acceptance of the ends that Nature, assisted by the advertisement-writers, sets before us. But this type of Utilitarianism is less frequent in actual occurrence than its vogue in popular literature and elsewhere may appear to indicate. As a matter of fact, we more often look to satisfaction, not as an end of effort or a condition to be preserved, but as the evidence that an experimental venture has been justified in its event. And this is a widely different matter, for in this there is no inherent implication of a habit-bound or egoistic narrowness of interest in the conceiving or the launching of the venture.
The economic interest, as a function of intelligence, finds its proper expression in a valuation set upon one thing in terms of another--a valuation that is either a step in a settled plan of spending and consumption or marks the passing of an old plan and our embarkation on a new. From such a view it must follow that the economic betterment of an individual or a society can consist neither in the accumulation of material wealth alone nor in a more diversified technical knowledge and skill. For the individual or for a collectivist state there must be added to these things alertness and imagination in the personal quest and discovery of values and a broad and critical intelligence in making the actual trial of them. Without a commensurate gain in these qualities it will avail little to make technical training and industrial opportunity more free or even to make the rewards of effort more equitable and secure. But it has been one of the purposes of this discussion to suggest that just this growth in outlook and intelligence may in the long run be counted on--not indeed as a direct and simple consequence of increasing material abundance but as an expression of an inherent creativeness in man that responds to discipline and education and will not fail to recognize the opportunity it seeks.
Real economic progress is ethical in aim and outcome. We cannot think of the economic interest as restricted in its exercise to a certain sphere or level of effort--such as "the ordinary business of life" or the gaining of a "livelihood" or the satisfaction of our so-called "material" wants, or the pursuit of an enlightened, or an unenlightened, self-regard. Economics has no special relation to "material" or even to commonplace ends. Its materialism lies not in its aim and tendency but in its problem and method. It has no bias toward a lower order of mundane values. It only takes note of the ways and degrees of dependence upon mundane resources and conditions that values of every order must acknowledge. It reminds us that morality and culture, if they are genuine, must know not only what they intend but what they cost. They must understand not only the direct but the indirect and accidental bearing of their purposes upon all of our interests, private and social, that they are likely to affect. The detachment of the economic interest from any particular level or class of values is only the obverse aspect of the special kind of concern it has with values of every sort. The very generality of the economic interest, and the abstractness of the ideas by which it maintains routine or safeguards change in our experience, are what make it unmistakably ethical. Without specific ends of its own, it affords no ground for dogmatism or apologetics. And this indicates as the appropriate task of economic theory not the arrest and thwarting but the steadying and shaping of social change.
THE MORAL LIFE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF VALUES AND STANDARDS[64] JAMES HAYDEN TUFTS Writing about ethics has tended to take one of two directions. On the one hand we have description of conduct in terms of psychology, or anthropology. On the other a study of the concepts right and wrong, good and bad, duty and freedom. If we follow the first line we may attempt to explain conduct psychologically by showing the simple ideas or feelings and the causal connections or laws of habit and association out of which actions arise. Or anthropologically we may show the successive stages of custom and taboo, or the family, religious, political, legal, and social institutions from which morality has emerged. But we meet at once a difficulty if we ask what is the bearing of this description and analysis. Will it aid me in the practical judgment "What shall I do?" In physics there is no corresponding difficulty. To analyze gravity enables us to compute an orbit, or aim a gun; to analyze electric action is to have the basis for lighting streets and carrying messages. It assumes the uniformity of nature and takes no responsibility as to whether we shall aim guns or whether our messages shall be of war or of peace.
Whereas in ethics it is claimed that the elements are so changed by their combination--that the _process_ is so essential a factor--that no prediction is certain. And it is also claimed that the ends themselves are perhaps to be changed as well as the means. Stated otherwise, suppose that mankind has passed through various stages, can mere observation of these tell me what next? Perhaps I don't care to repeat the past; how can I plan for a better future? Or grant that I may discover instinct and emotion, habit and association in my thinking and willing, how will this guide me to direct my thinking and willing to right ends?
The second method has tended to examine concepts. Good is an eternal, changeless pattern; it is to be discovered by a vision; or right and good are but other terms for nature's or reason's universal laws which are timeless and wholly unaffected by human desires or passions; moral nature is soul, and soul is created not built up of elements,--such were some of the older absolutisms. Right and good are unique concepts not to be resolved or explained in terms of anything else,--this is a more modern thesis which on the face of it may appear to discourage analysis.
The ethical world is a world of "eternal values." Philosophy "by taking part in empirical questions sinks both itself and them." These doctrines bring high claims, but are they more valuable for human guidance than the empirical method?[65] "The knowledge that is superhuman only is ridiculous in man." No man can ever find his way home with the pure circle unless he has also the art of the impure. It is the conviction of this paper that in ethics, as in knowledge, thoughts without contents are empty; percepts without concepts are blind. Description of what has been--empiricism--is futile in itself to project and criticize. Intuitions and deductions a priori are empty. The "thoughts" of ethics are of course the terms right, good, ought, worth, and their kin. The "percepts" are the instincts and emotions, the desires and aspirations, the conditions of time and place, of nature, and institutions.
Yet it is misleading to say that in studying the history of morals we are merely empiricists, and can hope to find no criterion. This would be the case if we were studying non-moral beings. But moral beings have to some degree guided life by judgments and not merely followed impulse or habit. Early judgments as to taboos, customs, and conduct may be crude and in need of correction; they are none the less judgments. Over and over we find them reshaped to meet change from hunting to agriculture, from want to plenty, from war to peace, from small to large groupings.
Much more clearly when we consider civilized peoples, the interaction between reflection and impulse becomes patent. To study this interaction can be regarded as futile for the future only if we discredit all past moral achievement.
Those writers who have based their ethics upon concepts have frequently expressed the conviction that the security of morality depends upon the question whether good and right are absolute and eternal essences independent of human opinion or volition. A different source of standards which to some offers more promise for the future is the fact of the moral life _as_ a constant process of forming and reshaping ideals and of bringing these to bear upon conditions of existence. To construct a right and good is at least a process tending to responsibility, if this construction is to be for the real world in which we must live and not merely for a world of fancy or caprice. It is not the aim of this paper to give a comprehensive outline of ethical method. Four factors in the moral life will be pointed out and this analysis will be used to emphasize especially certain social and constructive aspects of our concepts of right and good.
I The four factors which it is proposed to emphasize are these: (1) Life as a biological process involving relation to nature, with all that this signifies in the equipment of instincts, emotions, and selective activity by which life maintains itself.
(2) Interrelation with other human beings, including on the one hand associating, grouping, mating, communicating, cooeperating, commanding, obeying, worshiping, adjudicating, and on the psychological side the various instincts, emotions, susceptibilities to personal stimulation and appropriate responses in language and behavior which underlie or are evoked by the life in common.
(3) Intelligence and reason, through which experience is interrelated, viewed as a whole, enlarged in imagination.
(4) The process of judgment and choice, in which different elements are brought together, considered in one conscious universe, evaluated or measured, thereby giving rise reciprocally to a self on the one hand and to approved or chosen objects on the other.
(1) Life. Life is at least the raw material of all values, even if it is not in itself entitled to be called good without qualification. For in the process of nourishing and protecting itself, the plant or animal selects and in the case of higher animals, manipulates; it adapts itself to nature and adapts nature to itself; it shows reciprocal relation of means to end, of whole to part. It foreshadows the conscious processes in so many ways that men have always been trying to read back some degree of consciousness. And life in the animal, at least, is regarded as having experiences of pleasure and pain, and emotions of fear, anger, shame, and sex, which are an inseparable aspect of values. If it is not the supreme or only good, if men freely sacrifice it for other ends, it is none the less an inevitable factor. Pessimistic theories indeed have contended that life is evil and have sought to place good in a will-less Nirvana. Yet such theories make limited appeal. Their protest is ultimately not against life as life but against life as painful. And their refutation is rather to be intrusted to the constructive possibilities of freer life than to an analysis of concepts.
Another class of theories which omit life from the good is that which holds to abstractly ontological concepts of good as an eternal essence or form. It must be remembered, however, that the idea of good was not merely a fixed essence. It was also for Plato the self-moving and the cause of all motion. And further, Plato evidently believed that life, the very nature of the soul, was itself in the class of supreme values along with God and the good. The prize of immortality was [Greek: kalon] and the hope great. And with Aristotle and his followers the good of contemplation no less truly than the good of action had elements of value derived from the vital process. Such a mystic as Spinoza, who finds good in the understanding values this because in it man is "active," and would unite himself with the All because in God is Power and Freedom. The Hebrew prophet found a word capable of evoking great ethical values when he urged his countrymen to "choose life," and Christian teaching found in the conception of "eternal life" an ideal of profound appeal. It is not surprising that with his biological interests Spencer should have set up life of greatest length and breadth as a goal.
The struggle of the present war emphasizes tremendously two aspects of this factor of life. National life is an ideal which gets its emotional backing largely from the imagery of our physical life. For any one of the small nations involved to give up its national life--whatever the possibilities of better organized industry or more comfortable material conditions--seems to it a desperate alternative. Self-defense is regarded by the various powers at war as a complete justification not merely for armed resistance or attack but for ruthless acts. And if we are tempted to say that the war involves a prodigal waste of individual life on a scale never known before, we are at the same time compelled to recognize that never before has the bare destruction of life aroused such horror.
For never before has peace set its forces so determinedly to protect life. The span of human life has been lengthened: the wastefulness of accident and disease has been magnified. The dumb acquiescence with which former generations accepted the death of infants and children and those in the prime of life has given way to active and increasingly successful efforts to preserve. The enormous increase in scientific study of biology, including eugenics, reflects not only an advance of science but a trend in morality. It is scarcely conceivable that it should grow less in absolute importance, whatever crises may temporarily cause its depreciation relatively to other values.
One exception to the growing appreciation calls for notice--the interest in immortality appears to be less rather than greater. The strong belief in life beyond the grave which since the days of ancient Egypt has prevailed in the main stream of Western culture seems not only to be affected by the scientific temper of the day, but also to be subject to a shift in interest. This may be in part a reaction from other-worldliness. In part it may be due to loss of fervor for a theological picture of a future heaven of a rather monotonous sort and may signify not so much loss of interest in life as desire for a more vital kind of continuance. It is not true that all that a man hath will he give for his life, yet it is true that no valuing process is intelligible that leaves out life with its impulses, emotions, and desires as the first factor to be reckoned with.
(2) The second factor is the life in common, with its system of relations, and its corresponding instincts, emotions, and desires.
So much has been written in recent years on the social nature of man that it seems unnecessary to elaborate the obvious. Protest has even been raised against the exaggeration of the social. But I believe that in certain points at least we have not yet penetrated to the heart of the social factor, and its significance for morals.
So far as the moral aspect is concerned I know nothing more significant than the attitude of the Common Law as set forth by Professor Pound.[66] This has sought to base its system of duties on relations. The relation which was prominent in the Middle Ages was that of landlord and tenant; other relations are those of principal and agent, of trustee, etc. An older relation was that of kinship. The kin was held for the wergeld; the goel must avenge his next of kin; the father must provide for prospective parents-in-law; the child must serve the parents. Duty was the legal term for the relation. In all this there is no romanticism, no exaggeration of the social; there is a fair statement of the facts which men have recognized and acted upon the world over and in all times.
Individualistic times or peoples have modified certain phases. The Roman law sought to ground many of its duties in the contract, the will of the parties. But covenants by no means exhaust duties. And according to Professor Pound the whole course of English and American law today is belying the generalization of Sir Henry Maine, that the evolution of law is a progress from status to contract. We are shaping law of insurance, of public service companies, not by contract but by the relation of insurer and insured, of public utility and patron.
Psychologically, the correlate of the system of relations is the set of instincts and emotions, of capacity for stimulation and response, which presuppose society for their exercise and in turn make society possible.
There can be no question as to the reality and strength of these in both animals and men. The bear will fight for her young more savagely than for her life. The human mother's thoughts center far more intensely upon her offspring than upon her own person. The man who is cut dead by all his acquaintance suffers more than he would from hunger or physical fear. The passion of sex frequently overmasters every instinct of individual prudence. The majority of men face poverty and live in want; relatively few prefer physical comfort to family ties. Aristotle's [Greek: philia] is the oftenest quoted recognition of the emotional basis of common life, but a statement of Kant's earlier years is particularly happy. "The point to which the lines of direction of our impulses converge is thus not only in ourselves, but there are besides powers moving us in the will of others outside of ourselves. Hence arise the moral impulses which often carry us away to the discomfiture of selfishness, the strong law of duty, and the weaker of benevolence. Both of these wring from us many a sacrifice, and although selfish inclinations now and then preponderate over both, these still never fail to assert their reality in human nature. Thus we recognize that in our most secret motives, we are dependent upon the rule of the general will."[67] The "law of duty," and I believe we may add, the conception of right, do arise objectively in the social relations as the common law assumes and subjectively in the social instincts, emotions, and the more intimate social consciousness which had not been worked out in the time of Kant as it has been by recent authors. This point will receive further treatment later, but I desire to point out in anticipation that if right and duty have their origin in this social factor there is at least a presumption against their being subordinate ethically to the conception of good as we find them in certain writers. If they have independent origin and are the outgrowth of a special aspect of life it is at least probable that they are not to be subordinated to the good unless the very notion of good is itself reciprocally modified by right in a way that is not usually recognized in teleological systems.
(3) Intelligence and reason imply (_a_) considering the proposed act or the actually performed act as a whole and in its relations. Especially they mean considering consequences. In order to foresee consequences there is required not only empirical observation of past experience, not only deduction from already formulated concepts--as when we say that injustice will cause hard feelings and revolt--but that rarer quality which in the presence of a situation discerns a meaning not obvious, suggests an idea, "injustice," to interpret the situation. Situations are neither already labeled "unjust," nor are they obviously unjust to the ordinary mind. Analysis into elements and rearrangement of the elements into a new synthesis are required. This is eminently a synthetic or "creative" activity. Further it is evident that the activity of intelligence in considering consequences implies not only what we call reasoning in the narrower sense but imagination and feeling. For the consequences of an act which are of importance ethically are consequences which are not merely to be described but are to be imagined so vividly as to be felt, whether they are consequences that affect ourselves or affect others.
(_b_) But it would be a very narrow intelligence that should attempt to consider only consequences of a single proposed act without considering also other possible acts and their consequences. The second important characteristic of intelligence is that it considers either other means of reaching a given end, or other ends, and by working out the consequences of these also has the basis for deliberation and choice.
The method of "multiple working hypotheses," urged as highly important in scientific investigation, is no less essential in the moral field. To bring several ends into the field of consideration is the characteristic of the intelligent, or as we often say, the open-minded man. Such consideration as this widens the capacity of the agent and marks him off from the creature of habit, of prejudice, or of instinct.
(_c_) Intelligence implies considering in two senses all persons involved, that is, it means taking into account not only how an act will affect others but also how others look at it. It is scarcely necessary to say that this activity of intelligence cannot be cut off from its roots in social intercourse. It is by the processes of give and take, of stimulus and response, in a social medium that this possibility of looking at things from a different angle is secured. And once more this different angle is not gained by what in the strict sense could be called a purely intellectual operation, although it has come to be so well recognized as the necessary equipment for dealing successfully with conditions that we commonly characterize the person as stupid who does not take account of what others think and feel and how they will react to a projected line of conduct. This social element in intelligence is to a considerable degree implied in the term "reasonable," which signifies not merely that a man is logical in his processes but also that he is ready to listen to what others say and to look at things from their point of view whether he finally accepts it or not.
The broad grounds on which it is better to use the word intelligence than the word reason in the analysis with which we are concerned are two. (1) It is not a question-begging term which tends to commit us at the outset to a specific doctrine as to the source of our judgments. (2) The activity of intelligence which is now most significant for ethical progress is not suggested by the term reason, for unless we arbitrarily smuggle in under the term practical reason the whole activity of the moral consciousness without inquiry as to the propriety of the name we shall be likely to omit the constructive and creative efforts to promote morality by positive supplying of enlarged education, new sources of interest, and more open fields for development, by replacing haunting fears of misery with positive hopes, and by suggesting new imagery, new ambitions in the place of sodden indifference or sensuality. The term reason as used by the Stoics and by Kant meant control of the passions by some "law"--some authority cosmic or logical. It prepared for the inevitable; it forbade the private point of view. But as thus presenting a negative aspect the law was long ago characterized by a profound moral genius as "weak." It has its value as a schoolmaster, but it is not in itself capable of supplying the new life which dissolves the old sentiment, breaks up the settled evil habit, and supplies both larger ends and effective motives.
If we state human progress in objective fashion we may say that although men today are still as in earlier times engaged in getting a living, in mating, in rearing of offspring, in fighting and adventure, in play, and in art, they are also engaged in science and invention, interested in the news of other human activities all over the world; they are adjusting differences by judicial processes, cooeperating to promote general welfare, enjoying refined and more permanent friendships and affections, and viewing life in its tragedy and comedy with enhanced emotion and broader sympathy. Leaving out of consideration the work of the religious or artistic genius as not in question here, the great objective agencies in bringing about these changes have been on the one hand the growth of invention, scientific method, and education, and on the other the increase in human intercourse and communication. Reason plays its part in both of these in freeing the mind from wasteful