upon the most sweeping generalizations and the preconceptions which disclosed themselves in manifold forms. Just as naturally they had no eyes with which to detect the significance of the besetting problems at which, in matters more concrete, the masters were toiling. Hence the contradictions, revealed in the analysis we have just given of the philosophy of the age, stood out in utter nakedness.
The result was inevitable. The inability to discover a unitary predicate, more still, the failure to attain a working copula, led directly to the denial of the possibility of predication. There was no truth. Granted that it existed, it could not be known. Even if known, it could not be communicated. In these incisive words of Gorgias the conclusion of the ineffectual effort to establish a logic of science is clearly stated. But the statement is happily only the half-truth, which is almost a complete falsehood. It takes no account of the indications, everywhere present, of a needed reconstruction. Least of all does it catch the meaning of such a demand.
The Sophists did not, however, merely repeat in abstract from the teachings of the philosophers. It matters not whether they originated the movement or not; at all events they were pioneers in the field of moral philosophy. Here it was that they chiefly drew the inferences from the distinction between [Greek: physei] and [Greek: nomô]. Nothing could have been more effective in disengaging the firmly rooted moral pre-possessions and rendering them amenable to philosophy. Just here, at last, we catch a hint of the significance of the logical process. In a striking passage in Plato's _Protagoras_,[106] which one is fain to regard as an essentially true reproduction of a discourse by that great man, Justice and Reverence are accorded true validity. On inquiring to what characteristic this honorable distinction is due, we find that it does not reside in themselves; it is due to _the assumption that a state must exist_.
Here, then, in a word, is the upshot of the logical movement. Logical predicates are essentially hypothetical, deriving their validity from the interest that moves men to affirm them. When they lose this hypothetical character, as terms within a volitional system, and set up as entities at large, they cease to function and forfeit their right to exist.
X VALUATION AS A LOGICAL PROCESS The purpose of this discussion is to supply the main outlines of a theory of value based upon analysis of the valuation-process from the logical point of view. The general principle which we shall seek to establish is that judgments of value, whether passed upon things or upon modes of conduct, are essentially objective in import, and that they are reached through a process of valuation which is essentially of the same logical character as the judgment-process whereby conclusions of physical fact are established--in a word, that the valuation-process, issuing in the finished judgment of value expressive of the judging person's definitive attitude toward the thing in question, is constructive of an order of reality in the same sense as, in current theories of knowledge, is the judgment of sense-perception and science.
Our method of procedure to this end will be that of assuming, and adhering to as consistently as possible, the standpoint of the individual in the process of deliberating upon an ethical or economic problem (for, as we shall hold, all values properly so called are either ethical or economic), and of ascertaining, as accurately as may be, the meaning of the deliberative or evaluating process and of the various factors in it as these are presented in the individual's apprehension.
It is in this sense that our procedure will be logical rather than psychological. We shall be concerned to determine the _meaning_ of the object of valuation as object, of the standard of value as standard, and of the valued object as valued, in terms of the individual's own apprehension of these, rather than to ascertain the nature and conditions of his apprehensions of these considered as psychical events. Our attention will throughout be directed to these factors or phases of the valuation-process in their functional aspect of determinants of the valuing agent's practical attitude, and never, excepting for purposes of incidental illustration and in a very general and tentative way, as events in consciousness mediated by more "elementary" psychical processes. The results which we shall gain by adhering to this method will enable us to see not merely that our judgments of value are in function and meaning objective, but also that our judgments of sense-perception and science are, as such, capable of satisfactory interpretation only as being incidental to the attainment and progressive reconstruction of judgments of value.
The first three main divisions will be given over to establishing the objectivity of content and function of judgments of value. The fourth division will present a detailed analysis of the two types of judgment of value, the ethical and economic, defining them and relating them to each other, and correlating them in the manner just suggested with judgment of the physical type. After considering, in the fifth part, certain general objections to the positions thus stated, we shall proceed in the sixth and concluding division to define the function of the consciousness of value in the economy of life.[107] I The system of judgments which defines what one calls the objective order of things is inevitably unique for each particular individual. No two men can view the world from the standpoint of the same theoretical and practical interests, nor can any two proceed in the work of gaining for themselves knowledge of the world with precisely equal degrees of skill and accuracy. Each must be prompted and guided, in the construction of his knowledge of single things and of the system in which they have their being, by his own particular interests and aims; and even when one person in a measure shares in the interests and aims of another, the rate and manner of procedure will not be the same for both, nor will the knowledge gained be for both equally systematic in arrangement or in interrelation of its parts. Each man lives in a world of his own--a world, indeed, identical in certain fundamental respects with the worlds which his fellow-men have constructed for themselves, but one nevertheless necessarily unique through and through because each man is a unique individual. There is, doubtless, a "social currency" of objects which implies a certain identity of meaning in objects as experienced by different individuals. The existence of society presupposes, and its evolution in turn develops and extends, a system of generally accepted objects and relations. Nevertheless, the "socially current object" is, as such, an abstraction just as the uniform social individual is likewise an abstraction. The only concrete object ever actually known or in any wise experienced by any person is the object as constructed by that person in accordance with his own aims and purposes, and in which there is, therefore, a large and important share of meaning which is significant to no one else.
It is needless in this discussion to dwell at length upon the general principle of recent "functional" psychology, that practical ends are the controlling factors in the acquisition of our knowledge of objective things. We shall take for granted the truth of the general proposition that cognition, in whatever sphere of science or of practical life, is essentially teleological in the sense of being incidental always, more or less directly, to the attainment of ends. Cognition, as the apperceptive or attentive process, is essentially the process of scrutinizing a situation (whether theoretical or practical) with a view to determining the availability for one's intended purpose of such objects and conditions as the situation may present. The objects and conditions thus determined will be made use of or ignored, counted upon as advantageous or guarded against as unfavorable--in a word, responded to--in ways suggested by their character as ascertained through reference to the interest in question. In this sense, then, objective things as known by individual persons are essentially complex stimuli whose proper function and reason for being it is to elicit useful responses in the way of conduct--responses conducive to the realization of ends.
From this point of view, then, the difference between one person's knowledge of a particular object and another's signifies (1) a difference between these persons' original purposes in setting out to gain knowledge of the object, and (2) consequently a difference between their present ways of acting with reference to the object. The bare object as socially current is, at best, for each individual simply a ground upon which subsequent construction may be made; and the subsequent construction which each individual is prompted by his circumstances and is able to work out in judgment first makes the object, for this individual, real and for his purposes complete.
Now, it is our primary intention to show that objects are, in cases of a certain important class, not yet ready to serve the person who knows them in their proper character of stimuli, when they have been, even exhaustively, defined in merely physical terms. It is very often not enough that the dimensions of an object and its physical properties, even the more recondite ones as well as those more commonly understood--it is often not enough for the purposes of an agent that these characters should make up the whole sum of his knowledge of the object in question. A measure of knowledge in terms of physical categories is often only a beginning--the result of a preliminary stage of the entire process of teleological determination, which must be carried through before the object of attention can be satisfactorily known. In the present study of the logic of valuation we shall be occupied exclusively with the discussion of cases of this kind. In our judgments of sense-perception and physical science we have presented to us material objects in their physical aspect. When these latter are inadequate to suggest or warrant overt conduct, our knowledge of them must be supplemented and reconstructed in ways presently to be specified. It is in the outcome of judgment-processes in which this work of supplementing and reconstructing is carried through that the consciousness of value, in the proper sense, arises, and these processes, then, are those which we shall here consider under the name of "processes of valuation." They will therefore best be approached through specification of the ways in which our physical judgments may be inadequate.
Let us, then, assume, as has been indicated, that the process of acquiring knowledge--that is to say, the process of judgment or attention--is in every case of its occurrence incidental to the attainment of an end. We must make this assumption without attempting formally to justify it--though in the course of our discussion it will be abundantly illustrated. Let us, in accordance with this view, think of the typical judgment-process as proceeding, in the main, as follows: First of all must come a sense of need or deficiency, which may, on occasion, be preceded by a more or less violent and sudden shock to the senses, forcibly turning one's attention to the need of immediate action. By degrees this sense of need will grow more definite and come to express itself in a more or less "clear and distinct" image of an end, toward which end the agent is drawn by desire and to which he looks with much or little of emotion. The emergence of the end into consciousness immediately makes possible and occasions definite analysis of the situation in which the end must be worked out. Salient features of the situation forthwith are noticed--whether useful things or favoring conditions, or, on the other hand, the absence of any such.
Thus predicates and then subjects for many subsidiary judgments in the comprehensive judgment-process emerge together in action and interaction upon each other. The predicates, developed out of the general end toward which the agent strives, afford successive points of view for fresh analyses of the situation. The logical subjects thus discovered--_objects_ of attention and knowledge--require, on the other hand, as they are scrutinized and judged, modification and re-examination of the end. The end grows clearer and fuller of detail as the predicates or implied ("constituent") ideas which are developed out of it are distinguished from each other and used in making one's inventory of the objective situation. Conversely, the situation loses its first aspect of confusion and takes on more and more the aspect of an orderly assemblage of objects and conditions, useful, indifferent, and adverse, by means of which the end may in greater or less measure be attained or must, in however greatly modified a form, be defeated. Now, in this development of the judgment-process, it must be observed, the end must be more or less clearly and consistently conceived throughout as an _activity_, if the objective means of action which have been determined in the process are not to be, at the last, separate and unrelated data still requiring co-ordination. If the end has been so conceived, the means will inevitably be known as members of a mechanical _system_, since the predicates by which they have been determined have at every point involved this factor of amenability to co-ordination.
The judgment-process, if properly conducted and brought to a conclusion, must issue at the end in the functional unity of a finished plan of conduct with a perfected mechanical co-ordination of the available means.
We have now to see that much more may be involved in such a process as this than has been explicitly stated in our brief analysis. For the end itself may be a matter of deliberation, just as must be the physical means of accomplishing it; and, again, the means may call for scrutiny and determination from other points of view than the physical and mechanical. The final action taken at the end may express the outcome of deliberate ethical and economic judgment as well as of judgments in the sphere of sense-perception and physical science. Let us consider, for example, that one's end is the construction of a house upon a certain plot of ground. This end expresses the felt need of a more comfortable or more reputable abode, and has so much of general presumption in its favor. There may, however, be many reasons for hesitation. The cost in time or money or materials on hand may tax one's resources and injuriously curtail one's activities along other lines. And there may be ethical reasons why the plan should not be carried out. The house may shut off a pleasing prospect from the view of the entire neighborhood and serve no better end than the gratification of its owner's selfish vanity. It will cost a sum of money which might be used in paying just, though outlawed, debts.
Now, from the standpoint of such problems as these the fullest possible preliminary knowledge of the physical and mechanical fitness of our means must still be very abstract and general. It would be of use in any undertaking like the one we have supposed, but it is not sufficient in so far as the problem is one's own problem, concrete, particular, and so unique. One may, of course, proceed to the stage of physical judgment without having settled the ethical problems which may have presented themselves at the outset. The end may be entertained tentatively as a hypothesis until certain mechanical problems have been dealt with. But manifestly this is only postponement of the issue. The agent is still quite unprepared, even after the means have been so far determined, to take the first step in the execution of the plan; indeed, his uncertainty is probably only the more harassing than before.
Moreover, the economic problems in the case are now more sharply defined, and these for the time being still further darken counsel.
Manifestly the need for deliberation is at this point quite as urgent as the need for physical determination can ever be, and the need is evidenced in the same way by the actual arrest and postponement of overt conduct. The agent, despite his physical knowledge, is not yet free to embrace the end and, having done so, use thereto the means at his disposal. It is plainly impossible to use the physical means until one knows in terms of Substance and Attribute or Cause and Effect, or whatever other physical categories one may please, what manner of behavior may be expected of them. So likewise is it as truly impossible, for one intellectually and morally capable of appreciating problems of a more advanced and complex sort, to exploit the physical properties thus discovered until ethical determination of the end and economic determination of the means have been completed.[108] There are, then, we conclude, cases in which physical determination of the means is by itself not a sufficient preparation for conduct--in which there are ethical and economic problems which delay the application of the physical means to the end to which they may be physically adapted. Indeed, so much as this may well appear as sufficiently obvious without extended illustration. Everyone knows that it is nearly always necessary, in undertaking any work in which material things are used as means, to count the cost; and everyone knows likewise that not every end that is in any way attractive and within one's reach may without more ado be taken as an object of settled desire and effort.
It is indeed needless to elaborate these commonplaces in the sense in which they are commonly understood. However, such is not our present purpose. Our purpose is the more specific one of showing that the meaning of Objectivity must be widened so as to include (1) the "universe" of ends in their ethical aspect and (2) the economic aspect of the means of action, as well as (3) the physical aspect to which the character of Objectivity is commonly restricted. We shall maintain that these are parts or phases of a complete conception of Reality, and that of them, consequently, Objectivity must be predicated for every essential reason connoted by such characterization of the world of things "external" to the senses. It has been with this conclusion in mind, then, that we have sought to emphasize the frequent serious inadequacy, for practical purposes, of the merely physical determination of the means in one's environment.
The principle thus suggested would imply that the ethical and economic stages in the one inclusive process of reflective attention should be regarded as involving, when they occur, the same logical function of judgment as is operative in the sphere of sense-perception and the sciences generally. Ethical and economic factors must on occasion be present at the final choice and shaping of one's course of conduct, along with the physical determinations of environing means and conditions which one has made in sense-perception. There is, then, it would appear, at least a fair presumption, though not indeed an _a priori_ certainty, that these ethical and economic factors or conditions have, like the physical, taken form in a _judgment-process_ which will admit of profitable analysis in accordance with whatever general theory of judgment one may hold as valid elsewhere in the field of knowledge.
This presumption we shall seek to verify. Now, our interest in thus determining, first of all, the logical character of these processes will readily be understood from this, that, in the present view, these are the processes, and the only ones in our experience, which are properly to be regarded as processes of Valuation. We shall hold that Valuation, and so all consciousness of Value, properly so called, must be either ethical or economic; that the only conscious processes in which Values can come to definition are these processes of ethical and economic judgment. The present theory of Value is, then, essentially a logical one, in the sense of holding that Values are determined in and by a logical--that is, a judgmental--valuation-process and in its details is closely dependent upon the general conception of judgment of which the outlines have been sketched above. Accordingly, the exposition must proceed in the following general order: Assuming the conception of judgment which has been presented (which our discussion will in several ways further illustrate and so tend to confirm), we shall seek to show that the determinations made in ethical and economic judgment are in the proper sense objective. This will involve, first of all, a statement of the conditions under which the ethical and economic judgments respectively arise--which statement will serve to distinguish the two types of judgment from each other. We shall then proceed to the special analysis of the ethical and economic forms from the standpoint of our general theory of judgment, thereby establishing in detail the judgmental character of these parts of the reflective process. This analysis will serve to introduce our interpretation of the consciousness of Value as a factor in the conduct and economy of life.
II Let us then define the problem of the objective reference of the valuational judgments by stating, as distinctly as may be, the conditions by which ethical and economic deliberation, respectively, are prompted. A study of these conditions will make it easier to see in what way the judgments reached in dealing with them can be objective.
When will an end, presenting itself in consciousness in the manner indicated in our brief analysis of the judgment-process, become the center of attention, thereby checking the advance, through investigation of the possible means, to final overt action? This is the general statement of the problem of the typical ethical situation. Manifestly there will be no ethical deliberation if the imaged end at once turns the attention toward the environment of possible means, instead of first of all itself becoming the object instead of the director of attention; there will be no suspension of progress toward final action, excepting such as may later come through difficulty in the discovery and co-ordination of the means. However, there are cases in which the emergence of the end forthwith is followed by a check to the reflective process, and the agent shrinks from the end presented in imagination as being, let us say, one forbidden by authority or one repugnant to his own established standards. The end may in such a case disappear at once; very often it will insistently remain. On this latter supposition, the simplest possibility will be the development of a mere mechanical tension, a "pull and haul" between the end, or properly the impulses which it represents, and the agent's habit of suppressing impulses of the class to which the present one is, perhaps intuitively, recognized as belonging. The case is the common one of "temptation" on the one side and "principle" or "conscience" on the other, and so long as the two forces remain thus in hard-and-fast opposition to each other there can be no ethical deliberation or judgment in a proper sense. The standard or habit may gain the day by sheer mechanical excess of power, or the new impulse, the temptation, may prevail because its onset can break down the mechanical resistance.
Out of such a situation as this, however, genuine ethical deliberation may arise on condition that standard and "temptation" can lose something of their abstractness and their hard-and-fast opposition, and develop into terms of concrete meaning. The agent may come to see that the end is in some definite way of really vital interest and too important to be put aside without consideration. He may, of course, in this fall into gross self-sophistication, like the drunkard in the classical instance who takes another glass to test his self-control and thereby gain assurance, or he may act with wisdom and with full sincerity, like Dorothea Casaubon when she renounced the impossible task imposed by her departed husband. In the moral life one can ask or hope for complete exemption from the risk of self-deception with as little reason as in scientific research. But however this may be, our present interest is in the method, not in particular results of ethical reflection. Whether properly so in a particular case or not, the imaged end may come to seem at least plausibly defensible on grounds of principle which serve to sanction certain other modes of conduct to which a place is given in the accepted scheme of life; or the end may simply press for a relatively independent recognition on the very general ground that its emergence represents an enlargement and new development of the personality.[109] The end may thus cease to stand in the character of blind self-assertive impulse, and press its claim as a positive means of future moral growth, as bringing freedom from repressive and enfeebling restraints and as tending to the reinforcement of other already valued modes of conduct. On the other hand, the standard will cease to stand as mere resistance and negation, and may discover something of its hidden meaning as a product of long experience and slow growth, and as perhaps a vital part of the organization of one's present life, not to be touched without grave risk.
Now, on whichever side the development may first commence, a like development must soon follow on the other, and it is the action and reaction of standard and prospective or problematic end upon each other that constitutes the process of ethical deliberation or judgment. Just as in the typical judgment-process, as sketched above, so also here predicate and subject _develop each other_, when once they have given over their first antagonism and come to the attitude of reasoning together. The predicate explains itself that the subject or new end may be searchingly and fairly tested; and under this scrutiny the subject develops its full meaning as a course of conduct, thereby prompting further analysis and reinterpretation of the standard. But this is not the place for detailed analysis of the process;[110] here we are concerned only to define the type of situation, and this we may now do in the following terms: The indispensable condition of ethical judgment is the presence in the agent's mind of at least two rival interesting ends or systems of such ends. In the foregoing, the subject of the judgment is the new end that has arisen; the predicate or "standard" is the symbol for the old ends or values which in the tension of the judgment-process must be brought to more or less explicit enumeration--and, we must add, reconstruction also. Indeed, it is important, even at this stage of our discussion, to observe that Predicate and Standard are not equivalent in meaning. The predicate, or predicative side, of judgment is the imagery of control in the process, which, as we have seen, develops with the subject side; while the term "Standard" connotes the rigid fixity which belongs to the inhibiting concept or ideal in the stage before the judgment-process proper can begin. The ethical judgment-process is, in a word, just the process of reconstructing standards--as in its other and corresponding aspect it is the process of interpreting new ends. Those who oppose measures of social reform or new modes of conduct or belief on alleged grounds of "immorality" instinctively feel in doing so that the change may make its way more easily against a resistance that will candidly explain itself; and, on the other side of the social judgment-process, the more fanatical know how to turn to good advantage for their propaganda the bitterness or contempt of those who represent the established order. On both sides there are those who trust more in mechanical "pull and haul" than in the intrinsic merits of their cause.
Thus it is by encountering some rival end or entire system of ends, as symbolized by an ideal, that a new end emerging out of impulse comes to stand for an agent, as the center of a problem of conduct, and so to occupy the center of attention. And it thereby becomes an Object, as we shall hold, which must be more fully defined in order that it may be _valued_, and accordingly be held to warrant a determinate attitude toward itself on the agent's part. We have now to define in the same general terms the typical economic situation.
In economic theory as in common thought it is not the contemplated act of applying certain means to the attainment of an end regarded as desirable that functions as the logical subject of valuation. The thing or object valued in the economic situation is one's present wealth, whether material or immaterial, one's services or labor--whatever one gives in exchange or otherwise sets apart for the attainment of a desired end or, proximately, to secure possession of the necessary and sufficient means to the attainment of a desired end. The object of attention in the valuing process is here not itself an end of action. In this respect the economic type of judgment is like the physical, for in both the object to be valued is a certain means which one is seeking to adapt to some more or less definitely imaged purpose; or a condition of which one wishes, likewise for some special purpose, to take advantage.
The ultimate goal of all judgment is the determination of a course of conduct looking toward an end, and our present problem may accordingly be stated in the following terms: Under what circumstances in the judgment-process does it become necessary to the definition and attainment of an end as yet vague and indeterminate that the requisite means, as in part already physically determined, should be further scrutinized in attention and determined from the economic point of view?
Or, in a word: What is the "jurisdiction" of the economic point of view?
For ordinary judgements of sense-perception the presence in consciousness of a single unquestioned end is the adequate occasion, as our analysis (assuming its validity) has shown. For ethical judgment we have seen that the presence of conflicting ends is necessary; and we shall now hold that this condition is necessary, though not, without a certain qualification, adequate, for the economic type as well. If an imaged end can hold its place in consciousness without a rival, and the physical means of attaining it have been found and co-ordinated, then the use or consumption of the means must inevitably follow, without either ethical or economic judgement; for, to paraphrase the saying of Professor James, nothing but an end can displace or inhibit effort toward another end. The economic situation differs, then, from the ethical in this, that the end or system of ends entering into competition with the one for the time being of chief and primary interest has been brought to consciousness through reference to those "physical" means which already have been determined as necessary to this latter end. The conflict of ends in the economic situation, that is to say, is not due to a direct and intrinsic incompatibility between them.
Where there manifestly is such incompatibility, judgment will be of the ethical type--as when building the house involves the foreclosure of a mortgage, and so, in working an injury to the holder of the site, may do violence to one's ideal of friendship or of more special obligation; or when an impulse to intemperate self-indulgence is met by one's ideal of social usefulness. In cases such as these one clearly sees, or can on reflection come to see, in what way an evil result to personal character will follow upon the imminent misdeed, and in what way suppression of the momentary impulse will conserve the entire approved and established way of life. Very often, however, the conflicting ends are related in no such mutually exclusive way. Each may be in itself permissible and compatible with the other, and, so far as any possible ethical discrimination can determine, there is no ground for choice between them. Thus it is only through the fact that both ends are dependent upon a limited supply of means that one would, for example, ever bring together and deliberately oppose in judgment the purpose of making additions to his library and the necessity of providing a store of fuel for the winter. Both ends in such a case are in themselves indeed permissible in a general way, but they may very well not both of them be economically possible, and hence, for the person in question and in the presence of the economic conditions which confront him, not, in the last analysis, both ethically possible. When there is a conflict between two ends that stand in close organic relation in the sense explained above, the problem is an ethical one; when the conflict is, in the sense explained, one of competition between ends ethically permissible--not at variance, either one, that is, with other ends _directly_--for the whole or for a share of one's supply of means, the problem is of the economic type.[111] There are three typical cases in which economic judgment or valuation of the means is necessary, and the enumeration of these will make clear the relation between the ethical and the economic types of judgment: (1) First may be mentioned the case in which ethical deliberation has apparently reached its end in the formation of a plan of action which, so far as one can see, on ethical grounds is unobjectionable. A definite "temptation" may have been overcome, or out of a more complex situation a satisfactory ethical compromise or readjustment may have been developed with much difficulty. Now, there are very often cases in which such a course of action still may not be entered on without further hesitation; for, if the plan be one requiring for its working out the use of material means, the fact of an existing limitation of one's supply of means must bring hitherto unthought of ends into conflict with it. There are doubtless many situations in which one's moral choice may be carried into practice without consideration of ways and means, as when one forgives an injury or holds his instinctive nature under discipline in the effort to attain an ascetic or a genuinely social ideal of character. But more often than the moral rigorist cares to see, questions of an economic nature must be raised after the ethical "evidence is all in"--questions which are probably more trying to a sensitive moral nature than those more dramatic situations in which the real perils of self-sophistication are vastly less, and the simpler, sharper definition of the issue makes possible a less difficult, though a more decisive and edifying, victory. (2) In the second place are those cases in which the end that has emerged is without conspicuous moral quality, because, although it may represent some worthy impulse, it has