environment in fact concludes as an abolition of it in words. The philosophic system becomes a solipsism, a pure lyric expression of the appetites of human nature.
For this perversity of the philosophic tradition Plato is perhaps, more than any one else, answerable. He is the first explicitly to have reduplicated the world, to have set existences over against values, to have made them dependent upon values, to have assigned absolute reality to the compensatory ideals, and to have identified philosophy with preoccupation with these ideals. Behind his theory of life lay far from agreeable personal experience of the attitude of political power toward philosophic ideas. Its ripening was coincident with the most distressing period of the history of his country. The Peloponnesian War was the confrontation of two social systems, radically opposed in form, method, and outlook. Democracy, in Athens, had become synonymous with demagoguery, corruption, inefficiency, injustice and unscrupulousness in every aspect of public affairs. The government had no consistent policy and no centralized responsibility; divided counsel led to continual disaster without, and party politics rotted the strength within. Beside Athens, Sparta, a communistic oligarchy, was a tower of strength and effectiveness. The Spartans made mistakes; they were slow, inept, rude, and tyrannical, but they were a unit on the war, their policy was consistent, responsibilities were adequately centered, good order and loyalty designated the aims and habits of life.[98] The Republic is the response to the confrontation of Spartan and Athenian; the attempt to find an adequate solution of the great social problem this confrontation expressed. The successful state becomes in it the model for the metaphysical one, and the difference between fact and ideal is amended by dialectically forcing the implications of existence in the direction of desire. Neither Athens nor Sparta presented a completely satisfactory social organization. There must therefore exist a type of social organization which is so satisfying. It must have existed from eternity, and must be in essence identical with eternal good, identical with that oneness and spirituality, lacking which, nothing is important. This archetypal social organization whose essence is excellence, it is the congenital vocation of the philosopher to contemplate and to realize.
Philosophers are hence the paragons among animals, lovers of truth, haters of falsehood and of multiplicity, spectators of all time and all existence. In them the power to govern should be vested. Their nature is of the same stuff as the Highest Good with which it concerns itself, but being such, it appears, merely "appears" alas! irrelevant to the actual situations of the daily life. The philosopher is hence opposed and expelled by that arch-sophist, Public Opinion: the man on the street, failing to understand him, dubs him prater, star-gazer, good-for-nothing.[99] He becomes an ineffectual stranger, an outlaw, in a world in which he should be master.
Plato's description of the philosopher and philosophy is, it will be seen, at once an apology and a program. But it is a program which has been petrified into a compensatory ideal. The confession of impotence, the abandonment of the programmatic intent is due to identification of the ideal with metaphysical fact, to the hypostasis of the ideal. With Christianism, that being a philosophy operating as a religion, world-weariness made the apology unnecessary and converted the hypostasis into the basis of that program of complete surrender of the attempt to master the problems of existence upon which ensued the arrest of science and civilization for a thousand years. The Greeks were not world-weary, and consequently, their joy in life and existence contributed a minimum of relevance to their other-worldly dreams. Need it be reasserted that the whole Platonic system, at its richest and best in the Republic, is both an expression of and a compensation for a concrete social situation? Once it was formulated it became a part of that situation, altered it, served as another among the actual causes which determined the subsequent history of philosophy. Its historic and efficacious significance is defined by that situation, but philosophers ignore the situation and accept the system as painters accept a landscape--as the thing in itself.
Now, the aesthetic aspect of the philosophic system, its autonomy, and consequent irrelevancy, are undeniable. Once it comes to be, its intrinsic excellence may constitute its infallible justification for existence, with no more to be said; and if its defenders or proponents claimed nothing more for it than this immediate satisfactoriness, there would be no quarrel with them. There is, however, present in their minds a sense of the other bearings of their systems. They claim them, in any event, to be _true_, that is, to be relevant to a situation regarded as more important because more lastingly determinative of conduct, more "real" than the situation of which they are born. Their systems are offered, hence, as maps of life, as guides to the everlasting. That they intend to define some method for the conservation of life eternally, is clear enough from their initial motivation and formal issue: all the Socratics, with their minds fixed on happiness or salvation according to the prevalence of disillusionment among them; the Christian systems, still Socratic, but as resolutely other-worldly as disillusioned Buddhists; the systems of Spinoza, of Kant, the whole subsequent horde of idealisms, up to the contemporary Germanoid and German idealistic soliloquies,--they all declare that the vanity and multiplicity of life as it is leads them to seek for the permanent and the meaningful, and they each find it according to the idiosyncrasies of the particular impulses and terms they start with. That their Snark turns out in every case to be a Boojum is another story.
Yet this story is what gives philosophy, like religion, its social significance. If its roots, as its actual biography shows, did not reach deep in the soil of events, if its issues had no fruitage in events made over by its being, it would never have been so closely identified with intelligence and its systematic hypostasis would never have ensued. The fact is that philosophy, like all forms of creative intelligence, is a tool before it is a perfection. Its autonomy supervenes on its efficaciousness; it does not precede its efficaciousness. Men philosophize in order to live before they live in order to philosophize.
Aristotle's description of the self-sufficiency of theory is possible only for a life wherein theory had already earned this self-sufficiency as practice, in a life, that is, which is itself an art, organized by the application of value-forms to its existent psycho-physical processes in such a way that its existence incarnates the values it desiderates and the values perfect the existence that embodies them.
The biography of philosophy, hence, reveals it to have the same possibilities and the same fate that all other ideas have. Today ideas are the patent of our humanity, the stuff and form of intelligence, the differentiae between us and the beasts. In so far forth, they express the surplusage of vitality over need, the creative freedom of life at play.
This is the thing we see in the imaginings and fantasies of childhood, whose environment is by social intent formed to favor and sustain its being. The capacity for spontaneity of idea appears to decrease with maturity, and the few favored healthy mortals with whom it remains are called men of genius. William James was such a man, and there are a few still among the philosophers. But in the mass and in the long run, ideas are not a primary confirmation of our humanity; in the mass and long they are warnings of menace to it, a sign of its disintegration. Even so radical an intellectualist as Mr. Santayana cherishes this observation to the degree of almost suggesting it as the dogma that all ideas have their origin in inner or outer maladjustment.[100] However this may be, that the dominant philosophic ideas arise out of radical disharmonies between nature and human nature need not be here reiterated, while the provocative character of minor maladjustments is to be inferred from the fertility of ideas in unstable minds, of whatever type, from the neurasthenic to the mad. Ideas represent in these cases the limits of vital elasticity, the attempt of the organism to maintain its organic balance; it is as if a balloon, compressed on one side, bulged on the other.
Ideas, then, bear three types of relations to organic life, relations socially incarnated in traditional art, religion, and philosophy. First of all they may be an expression of innate capacities, the very essence of the freedom of life. In certain arts, such as music, they are just this. In the opposite case they may be the effect of the compression of innate capacities, an outcome of obstruction to the free low of life.
They are then compensatory. Where expressive ideas are confluent with existence, compensatory ideas diverge from existence; they become pure value-forms whose paramount realization is traditional philosophy. Their rise and motivation in both these forms is unconscious. They are ideas, but not yet intelligence. The third instance falls between these original two. The idea is neither merely a free expression of innate capacities, nor a compensation for their obstruction or compression.
Arising as the effect of a disharmony, it develops as an enchannelment of organic powers directed to the conversion of the disharmony into an adjustment. It does not _use up_ vital energies like the expressive idea, it is not an abortion of them, like the compensatory idea. It uses them, and is aware that it uses them--that is, it is a program of action upon the environment, of conversion of values into existences. Such an idea has the differentia of intelligence. It is creative; it actually converts nature into forms appropriate to human nature. It abolishes the Otherworld of the compensatory tradition in philosophy by incarnating it in this world; it abolishes the Otherworld of the religionist, rendered important by belittling the actual one, by restoring the working relationships between thoughts and things. This restoration develops as reconstruction of the world in fact. It consists specifically of the art and science which compose the efficacious enterprises of history and of which the actual web of our civilization is spun.
Manifest in its purity in art, it attends unconsciously both religion and philosophy, for the strands of life keep interweaving, and whatever is, in our collective being, changes and is changed by whatever else may be, that is in reach. The life of reason is initially unconscious because it can learn only by living to seek a reason for life. Once it discovers that it can become self-maintaining alone through relevance to its ground and conditions, the control which this relevance yields makes it so infectious that it tends to permeate every human institution, even religion and philosophy. Philosophy, it is true, has lagged behind even religion in relevancy, but the lagging has been due not to the intention of the philosopher but to the inherent character of the task he assumed. Both art and religion, we have seen, possess an immediacy and concreteness which philosophy lacks. Art reconstructs correlative portions of the environment for the eye, the ear, the hopes and fears of the daily life. Religion extends this reconstruction beyond the actual environment, but applies its saving technique at the critical points in the career of the group or the individual; to control the food-supply, to protect in birth, pubescence, marriage, and death. All its motives are grounded in specific instincts and needs, all its reconstructions and compensations culminate with reference to these. Philosophy, on the other hand, deals with the _whole_ nature of man and his _whole_ environment. It seeks primaries and ultimates. Its traditional task is so to define the universe as to articulate thereby a theory of life and eternal salvation. It establishes contact with reality at no individual, specific point: its reals are "real in general." It aims, in a word, to be relevant to all nature, and to express the whole soul of man. The consequence is inevitable: it forfeits relevance to everything natural; touching nothing actual, it reconstructs nothing actual. Its concretest incarnation is a dialectic design woven of words. The systems of tradition, hence, are works of art, to be contemplated, enjoyed, and believed in, but not to be acted on. For, since action is always concrete and specific, always determined to time, place, and occasion, we cannot in fact adapt ourselves to the aggregate infinitude of the environment, or that to ourselves. Something always stands out, recalcitrant, invincible, defiant. But it is just such an adaptation that philosophy intends, and the futility of the intention is evinced by the fact that the systems of tradition continue side by side with the realities they deny, and live unmixed in one and the same mind, as a picture of the ocean on the wall of a dining room in an inland town. Our operative relations to them tend always to be essentially aesthetic. We may and do believe in them in spite of life and experience, because belief in them, involving no action, involves no practical risk. Where action is a consequence of a philosophic system, the system seems to dichotomize into art and religion. It becomes particularized into a technique of living or the dogma of a sect, and so particularized it becomes radically self-conscious and an aspect of creative intelligence.
So particularized, it is, however, no longer philosophy, and philosophy has (I hope I may say this without professional bias) an inalienable place in the life of reason. This place is rationally defined for it by the discovery of its ground and function in the making of civilization; and by the perfection of its possibilities through the definition of its natural relationships. Thus, it is, in its essential historic character at least, as fine an art as music, the most inward and human of all arts. It may be, and human nature being what it is, undoubtedly will continue to be, an added item to the creations wherewith man makes his world a better place to live in, precious in that it envisages and projects the excellences and perfections his heart desires and his imagination therefore defines. So taken, it is not a substitution for the world, but an addition to it, a refraction of it through the medium of human nature, as a landscape painting by Whistler or Turner is not a substitution for the actual landscape, but an interpretation and imaginative perfection of it, more suitable to the eye of man. A system like Bergson's is such a work, and its aesthetic adequacy, its beauty, may be measured by the acknowledgment it receives and the influence it exercises. Choosing one of the items of experience as its medium, and this item the most precious in the mind's eye which the history of philosophy reveals, it proceeds to fabricate a dialectical image of experience in which all the compensatory desiderates are expressed and realized. It entices minds of all orders, and they are happy to dwell in it, for the nonce realizing in the perception of the system the values it utters. By abandoning all pretense to be true, philosophic systems of the traditional sort may attain the simple but supreme excellence of beauty, and rest content therewith.
The philosophic ideal, however, is traditionally not beauty but truth: the function of a philosophic system is not presentative, but _re_presentative and causal, and that the systems of tradition have had and still have consequences as well as character, is obvious enough. It is, however, to be noted that these consequences have issued out of the fact that the systems have been specific items of existence among other equally and even more specific items, thought by particular men, at particular times and in particular places. As such they have been programs for meeting events and incarnating values; operative ideals aiming to recreate the world according to determined standards. They have looked forward rather than backward, have tacitly acknowledged the reality of change, the irreducible pluralism of nature, and the genuineness of the activities, oppugnant or harmonizing, between the items of the Cosmic. Many they ostensibly negate. The truth, in a word, has been experimental and prospective; the desiderates they uttered operated actually as such and not as already existing. Historians of philosophy, treating it as if it had no context, have denied or ignored this role of philosophy in human events, but historians of the events themselves could not avoid observing and enregistering it.
Only within very recent years, as an effect of the concept of evolution in the field of the sciences, have philosophers as such envisaged this non-aesthetic aspect of philosophy's ground and function in the making of civilization and have made it the basis for a sober vision which may or may not have beauty, but which cannot have finality. Such a vision is again nothing more than traditional philosophy become conscious of its character and limitations and shorn of its pretense. It is a program to execute rather than a metaphysic to rest in. Its procedure is the procedure of all the arts and sciences. It frankly acknowledges the realities of immediate experience, the turbulence and complexity of the flux, the interpenetrative confusion of orders, the inward self-diversification of even the simplest thing, which "change" means, and the continual emergence of novel entities, unforeseen and unprevisible, from the reciprocal action of the older aggregate. This perceptual reality it aims to remould according to the heart's desire.
Accordingly it drops the pretense of envisaging the universe and devotes itself to its more modest task of applying its standards to a particular item that needs to be remade. It is believed in, but no longer without risk, for, without becoming a dogma, it still subjects itself to the tests of action. So it acknowledges that it must and will itself undergo constant modification through the process of action, in which it uses events, in their meanings rather than in their natures, to map out the future and to make it amenable to human nature. Philosophy so used is, as John Dewey somewhere says, a mode and organ of experience among many others. In a world the very core of which is change, it is directed upon that which is not yet, to previse and to form its character and to map out the way of life within it. Its aim is the liberation and enlargement of human capacities, the enfranchisement of man by the actual realization of values. In its integrate character therefore, it envisages the life of reason and realizes it as the art of life. Where it is successful, beauty and use are confluent and identical in it. It converts sight into insight. It infuses existence with value, making them one. It is the concrete incarnation of Creative Intelligence.
FOOTNOTES: [1] The word relation suffers from ambiguity. I am speaking here of _connexion_, dynamic and functional interaction. "Relation" is a term used also to express logical reference. I suspect that much of the controversy about internal and external relations is due to this ambiguity. One passes at will from existential connexions of things to logical relationship of terms. Such an identification of existences with _terms_ is congenial to idealism, but is paradoxical in a professed realism.
[2] There is some gain in substituting a doctrine of flux and interpenetration of psychical states, _a la_ Bergson, for that of rigid discontinuity. But the substitution leaves untouched the fundamental misstatement of experience, the conception of experience as directly and primarily "inner" and psychical.
[3] Mathematical science in its formal aspects, or as a branch of formal logic, has been the empirical stronghold of rationalism. But an empirical empiricism, in contrast with orthodox deductive empiricism, has no difficulty in establishing its jurisdiction as to deductive functions.
[4] It is a shame to devote the word idealism, with its latent moral, practical connotations, to a doctrine whose tenets are the denial of the existence of a physical world, and the psychical character of all objects--at least as far as they are knowable. But I am following usage, not attempting to make it.
[5] See Dr. Kallen's essay, below.
[6] The "they" means the "some" of the prior sentence--those whose realism is epistemological, instead of being a plea for taking the facts of experience as we find them without refraction through epistemological apparatus.
[7] It is interesting to note that some of the realists who have assimilated the cognitive relation to other existential relations in the world (instead of treating it as an unique or epistemological relation) have been forced in support of their conception of knowledge as a "presentative" or spectatorial affair to extend the defining features of the latter to all relations among things, and hence to make all the "real" things in the world pure "simples," wholly independent of one another. So conceived the doctrine of external relations appears to be rather the doctrine of complete externality of _things_. Aside from this point, the doctrine is interesting for its dialectical ingenuity and for the elegant development of assumed premises, rather than convincing on account of empirical evidence supporting it.
[8] In other words, there is a general "problem of error" only because there is a general problem of evil, concerning which see Dr. Kallen's essay, below.
[9] Compare the paper by Professor Bode.
[10] As the attempt to retain the epistemological problem and yet to reject idealistic and relativistic solutions has forced some Neo-realists into the doctrine of isolated and independent simples, so it has also led to a doctrine of Eleatic pluralism. In order to maintain the doctrine the subject makes no difference to anything else, it is held that _no_ ultimate real makes any difference to anything else--all this rather than surrender once for all the genuineness of the problem and to follow the lead of empirical subject-matter.
[11] There is almost no end to the various dialectic developments of the epistemological situation. When it is held that all the relations of the type in question are cognitive, and yet it is recognized (as it must be) that many such "transformations" go unremarked, the theory is supplemented by introducing "unconscious" psychical modifications.
[12] Conception-presentation has, of course, been made by many in the history of speculation an exception to this statement; "pure" memory is also made an exception by Bergson. To take cognizance of this matter would, of course, accentuate, not relieve, the difficulty remarked upon in the text.
[13] Cf. _Studies in Logical Theory_, Chs. I and II, by Dewey; also "Epistemology and Mental States," Tufts, _Phil. Rev._, Vol. VI, which deserves to rank as one of the early documents of the "experimental" movement.
[14] Cf. "The Definition of the Psychical," G. H. Mead, _Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago_.
induction and procedure by hypothesis occurs on p. 156.
[18] Perhaps the most complete exhibition of the breakdown of formal logic considered as an account of the operation of thought apart from its subject-matter is to be found in Schiller's _Formal Logic_.
[19] Cf. Stuart on "Valuation as a Logical Process" in _Studies in Logical Theory_.
[21] Cf. Montague, pp. 256-57; also Russell, _The Problems of_ Consciousness_, pp. 14ff., discussed below.
[22] Cf. Angell, "Relations of Psychology to Philosophy," _Decennial Publications of University of Chicago_, Vol. III; also Castro, "The Respective Standpoints of Psychology and Logic," _Philosophic Studies, University of Chicago_, No. 4.
[23] I am here following, in the main, Professor Holt because he alone appears to have had the courage to develop the full consequences of the premises of analytic logic.
[25] It is interesting to compare this onlooking act with the account of consciousness further on. As "psychological" this act of onlooking must be an act of consciousness. But consciousness is a cross-section or a projection of things made by their interaction with a nervous system.
Here consciousness is a function of all the interacting factors. It is in the play. It _is_ the play. It is not in a spectator's box. How can consciousness be a function of all the things put into the cross-section and yet be a mere beholder of the process? Moreover, what is it that makes any particular, spectacle, or cross-section "logical"? If it be said all are "logical" what significance has the term?
[28] In fact, Newton, in all probability, had the Cartesian pure notions in mind.
Philosophical Tendencies_, pp. 108 and 311.
[30] The character of elements and the nature of simplicity have been discussed in the preceding section.
[33] This lack of continuity between the cognitive function of the nervous system and its other functions accounts for the strange paradox in the logic of neo-realism of an act of knowing which is "subjective" and yet is the act of so palpably an objective affair as a nervous system. The explanation is that the essence of all deprecated subjectivity is, as before pointed out, functional isolation. That this sort of subjectivity should be identified with the "psychical" is not strange, since a living organism is very difficult to isolate, while the term "psychical," in its metaphysical sense, seems to stand for little else than just this complete isolation. Having once appealed to the nervous system it seems incredible that the physiological continuity of its functions with each other and with its environment should not have suggested the logical corollary. Only the force of the prepossession of mathematical atomism in analytic logic can account for its failure to do so.
[34] But it would be better to use the term "logically-practical" instead of "subjective" with the psychical implications of that term.
[35] An analysis which has been many times carried out has made it clear that scientific data never do more than approximate the laws and entities upon which our science rests. It is equally evident that the forms of these laws and entities themselves shift in the reconstructions of incessant research, or where they seem most secure could consistently be changed, or at least could be fundamentally different were our psychological structure or even our conventions of thought different. I need only refer to the _Science et Hypothese_ of Poincare and the _Problems of Science_ of Enriques. The positivist who undertakes to carry the structure of the world back to the data of observation, and the uniformities appearing in the accepted hypotheses of growing sciences cannot maintain that we ever succeed in isolating data which must remain the same in the kaleidoscope of our research science; nor are we better served if we retreat to the ultimate elements of points and instants which our pure mathematics assumes and implicitly defines, and in connection with which it has worked out the modern theory of the number and continuous series, its statements of continuity and infinity.
[36] In other words, science assumes that every error is _ex post facto_ explicable as a function of the real conditions under which it really arose. Hence, "consciousness," set over against Reality, was not its condition.
[37] C. Judson Herrick, "Some Reflections on the Origin and Significance of the Cerebral Cortex," _Journal of Animal Behavior_, Vol. III, pp.
228-233.
[46] It may still be argued that we must depend upon analogy in our acceptance or rejection of a new commodity. For any element of novelty must surely suggest something to us, must _mean_ something to us, if it is to attract or repel. Thus, the motor-car will whirl us rapidly over the country, the motor-boat will dart over the water without effort on our part. And in such measure as we have had them hitherto, we have always enjoyed experiences of rapid motion. These new instruments simply promise a perfectly well-known _sort_ of experience in fuller measure.
So the argument may run. And our mental process in such a case may accordingly be held to be nothing more mysterious than a passing by analogy from the _old_ ways in which we got rapid motion in the past to the _new_ way which now promises more of the same. And more of the same is what we want.
"More of the same" means here intensive magnitude and in this connection at all events it begs the question. Bergson's polemic seems perfectly valid against such a use of the notion. But kept in logical terms the case seems clearer. It is said that we reason in such a case by "analogy." We do, indeed; but what is analogy? The term explains nothing until the real process behind the term is clearly and realistically conceived. What I shall here suggest holds true, I think, as an account of analogical inference generally and not simply for the economic type of case we have here to do with. Reasoning is too often thought of as proceeding from given independent premises--as here (1) the fact that hitherto the driving we have most enjoyed and the sailing we have most enjoyed have been _fast_ and (2) the fact that the motor-car is _fast_.
But do we accept the conclusion because the premises suggest it in a way we cannot resist? On the contrary, stated thus, the premises clearly do _not_ warrant the conclusion that the motor-car will be enjoyable. Such a statement of the premises is wholly formal and _ex post facto_. What, then, is our actual mental process in the case? The truth is, I think, that we simply--yes, "psychologically"--wish to try _that promised unheard-of rate of speed_! That comes first and foremost. But we mean to be reasonably prudent on the whole, although we are avowedly adventurous just now in this particular direction! We, therefore, ransack our memory for _other fast things_ we have known, to see whether they have encouragement to give us. We try to supply ourselves with a major premise because the new proposal in its own right interests us--instead of having the major premise already there to coerce us by a purely "logical" compulsion as soon as we invade its sphere of influence. And confessedly, in point of "logic," there is no such compulsion in the second figure: there is only a timid and vexatious neutrality, a mere "not proven."
Why, then, do we in fact take the much admired "inductive leap," in seeming defiance of strict logic? Why do we close our eyes to logic, turn our back upon logic, behave as if logic were not and had never been? In point of fact, we do nothing of the sort. The "inductive leap" is no leap away from logic, but the impulsion of logic's mainspring seen only in its legitimate event. Because we have not taken care to see the impulse coming, it surprises us and we are frightened. And we look about for an illusive assurance in some "law of thought," or some question-begging "universal premise" of Nature's "uniformity." We do not see that we were already conditionally committed to the "leap" by our initial interest. Getting our premises together is no hurried forging of a chain to save us from our own madness in the nick of time. We are only hoping to rid ourselves of an excess of conservative ballast. To reason by analogy is not to repress or to dispense with the interest in the radically novel, but to give methodical and intelligent expression to that interest.
elsewhere; _Nicom. Ethics_, I, Chap. III (end).
[50] W. McDougall in his _Social Psychology_ (Ed. 1912, pp. 358 ff.)
recognizes "incomplete anticipation of the end of action" as a genuine type of preliminary situation in human behavior, but appears to regard this as in so far a levelling-down of man to the blindness of the "brutes." But "incompleteness" is a highly ambiguous term and seems here to beg the question. "Incompleteness" may be given an emphasis in which it imports conjecture and hypothesis--almost anything, in fact, but blindness. Rather do the brutes get levelled up to man by such facts as those McDougall cites.
[51] take _routine_ to be the essence and meaning of hedonism. There are two fundamental types of conduct--routine and constructiveness.
Reference may be made here to Boehm-Bawerk's pronouncement on hedonism in _Kapital und Kapitalzins_, 1912 (II-2, pp. 310 ff.): "What people love and hate, strive towards or fight off--whether only pleasure and pain or other 'lovable' and 'hatable' things as well,--is a matter of entire indifference to the economist. The only thing important is that they do love and hate certain things...The deductions of marginal utility theory lose no whit of their cogency even if certain ends (dependent for their realization upon a supply of goods inadequate to the fulfillment of all ends without limit) are held to have the character not of pleasure but of something else. The marginal utility may be a least pleasure or a competing least utility of some other sort..." (p. 317).
This is a not uncommon view. As W. C. Mitchell has suggested, it is too obvious to be wholly convincing. (_Journ. Pol. Ec._, Vol. XVIII. "The Rationality of Economic Activity.") Veblen has made it perfectly clear that particular matters of theory are affected by the presupposition of hedonism. (_Journ. Pol. Ec._, Vol. XVII, _Quart. Journ. Econ._, Vol.
XXII, p. 147 ff.) The matter is too complex for a footnote, but I think it of little consequence whether "pleasure" be in any case regarded as substantively the end of desire or not. This is largely a matter of words. What is important is the practical question whether a thing is _so habitual with me that when the issue arises I cannot or will not give it up and take an interest in something new_ the "utility" of which