In general the new commodity and the habits it engenders could not remain without effect upon a system into which they might be mechanically introduced. Certain items in the schedule, associated in use with those dispensed with for the new, must be rendered obsolete by the change. The new interests called into play will draw to themselves and to their further development attention which may be in large measure diverted from the interests of older standing. And in the new system all interests remaining over from the old will accordingly stand in a new light and their objects will be valued, will be held important, for reasons that will need fresh statement.53
In similar fashion it might be argued that the commodities or uses which one sacrifices for the sake of a new venture are inevitably more than a simple deduction that curtails one's schedule in a certain kind and amount. Such a deduction or excision must leave the remaining lines of the original complex hanging at loose ends. The catching-up of these and their coördination with the new interest must in any event amount, as has been contended, to a thoroughgoing reorganization. What must really happen then, in the event of action, is in principle nothing less than the disappearance of the whole from which the sacrificed uses are dissevered. These latter, therefore, stand in the process of decision as a symbol for the existing personal economy as a whole. The old order and the new confront each other as an accepted view of fact and a plausible hypothesis everywhere confront each other and the issue for the individual is the practical issue of making the transition to a new working level. To declare that the salient elements of the confronting complexes are quantitatively equivalent is only to announce in symbolic terms that the transition has been effected, the die cast.54
§ 13. The statement thus given has been purposely made, for many transactions of the sort referred to, something of an over-statement. If I contemplate purchasing a typewriter or a book on an unfamiliar but inviting subject it may well seem somewhat extravagant to describe the situation as an opposition between two schemes of life. Is the issue so momentous; is the act so revolutionary? But the purpose of our over-statement was simply to make clear the type of situation without regard to the magnitudes involved. No novelty that carries one in any respect beyond the range of existing habits can be wholly without its collateral effects nor can its proximate and proper significance be measured in advance. This is in principle as true of a relatively slight innovation as of a considerable one. And our present conscious exaggeration departs less widely from the truth than the alternative usual preoccupation of economic theory with the logic of routine desire and demand. For the phenomena of routine and habit are thereby made a standard by which all others, if indeed recognized as real at all, must be judged "exceptional." And, as we shall see, to do this introduces difficulty into certain parts of substantive economic theory.
Again, objection may attach to the view that equivalence of the "salient members" of the opposing systems is only another name for the comprehensive fact of the novelty's acceptance. For if we hesitate in such a case, is this not because we judge the price too high? What can this signify but that the service or satisfaction we expect from the novelty falls short of sufficing to convince us? And unless we are dealing with measured quantities, how can we come to this conclusion? Moreover, if the novel commodity is divided into units we may take a smaller quantity when the price demanded is "high" than if the price were lower. And does this not suggest predetermined value-magnitudes as data? But if one takes thus a smaller amount, as the argument contends, it is because there is a presumption of being able to make some important total use of it and there is no general reason apparent for supposing that this will be merely a fractional part of a larger but like significance that might be hoped for from a larger quantity. And on the other hand, the prospect simply may not tempt at all; the smaller quantity may be deemed an improbable support for a really promising total program and the present program will hold its ground, not seriously shaken. The total demand of a market for a given commodity is no doubt in some sort a mathematical function of the price. The lower the price the greater in some ratio will be the number of persons who will buy and in general the greater the number of units taken by those who are already buyers. But that such a proposition admits of statistical proof from the observation of a series of price changes in a market affords no presumption concerning the nature of the reasons that move any individual person to his action. The theoretical temptation is strong, here as elsewhere, in passing from the study of markets to the personal economy of the individual forthwith to find this also a trafficking in unit-quantities and marginal satisfactions to which the concepts and notation of market analysis will readily apply.
It remains to consider certain implications of this view of economic desire and demand.
II
§ 14. It is evident that the issue finally at stake in any economic problem of constructive comparison, is an ethical issue. Two immediate alternatives are before one—to expend a sum of money in some new and interesting way, or to keep it devoted to the uses of one's established plan. Upon the choice, one recognizes, hinge consequences of larger and more comprehensive importance than the mere present enjoyment or non-enjoyment of the new commodity.55 And these "more important" consequences are important because there appears to lie in them the possibility of a type of personal character divergent from the present type and from any present point of view incommensurable with it.56 The ethical urgency of such a problem will impress one in the measure in which one can see that such an issue really does depend upon his present action and irretrievably depends. And we are able now to see what that economic quality is that attaches to ethical problems at a certain stage of their development and calls for a supplementary type of treatment.
Let us first consider certain types of juncture in conduct that will be recognized at once as ethical and in which any economic aspect is relatively inconspicuous. Temperance or intemperance, truth or falsehood, idleness or industry, honesty or fraud, social justice or class-interest—these will serve. What makes such problems as these ethical is their demand for creative intelligence. In each, alternative types of character or manners of life stand initially opposed. If the concrete issue is really problematical, if there is no rule that one can follow in the case with full assurance, constructive comparison, whether covertly or openly, must come into play. How long, then, will a problem of temperance or intemperance, idleness or industry, preserve its obviously ethical character without admixture? Just so long, apparently, as the modes of conduct that come into view as possible solutions are considered and valued with regard to their directly physiological and psychological consequences alone. Any given sort of conduct, that is to say, makes inevitably for the formation of certain habits of mind or muscle, weakening, or precluding the formation of, certain others. Attention is engrossed that is thereby not available elsewhere, time and strength are expended, discriminations are dulled and sharpened, sympathies and sensitivities are narrowed and broadened, every trait and bent of character is directly or indirectly affected in some way by every resolve concluded and every action embarked upon. If one moves a certain way along a certain line he can never return to the starting-point and set out unchanged along any other. If one does one thing one cannot do another. And when the sufficient reasons for this mutual exclusion lie in the structure and organization of the human mind and body our deliberation as between the two alternatives, our constructive comparison of them remains upon the ethical plane.
If one does one thing one cannot do another. If we substitute the well-worn saying "one cannot eat his cake and have it" we indicate the economic plane of constructive comparison with all needful clearness.
This is in fact the situation that has been already under discussion at such length above and the economic quality of which we are just now in quest arises from neither more nor less than the fact of our dependence in the working out of our personal problems upon limited external resources. The eventual solution sought under these circumstances remains ethical as before. But to reach it, it is necessary to bring into consideration not only such other interests and ends as the psycho-physical structure of human nature and the laws of character-development show to be involved, but a still wider range of interests less intimately or "internally" related to the focal interest of the occasion but imperatively requiring to be heard. If my acquisition of a phonograph turns upon the direct psychological bearing of the new interest upon my other interests, its probable effects whether good or bad upon my musical tastes and the diplomatic complications with my neighbors in which the possession of the instrument may involve me, the problem of its purchase remains clearly in the ethical phase. But when I count the cost in terms of sacrifices which the purchase price makes necessary, from literature down to food and fuel, and must draw this whole range of fact also into the adjustment if I can, the economic phase is reached. In principle two entire and very concrete schemes of life now stand opposed. Just what concrete sacrifices I shall make I do not know—this, in fact, is one way of stating my problem. Nor, conversely, do I know just what I shall be able to make the phonograph worth to me. It is my task to come to a conclusion in the case that shall be explicit and clear enough to enable me to judge in the event whether my expectation has been realized and I have acted wisely or unwisely. Thus a problem is economic when the fact of the limitation of my external resources must be eventually and frankly faced. The characteristic quality of a problem grown economic is a certain vexatiousness and seeming irrationality in the ill-assorted array of nevertheless indisputable interests, prosaic and ideal, that have to be reduced to order.
It is perhaps this characteristic emotional quality of economic problems that has insensibly inclined economists to favor a simpler and more clear-cut analysis. As for ethical problems—they have been left to "conscience" or to the jurisdiction of a "greatest happiness" principle in which the ordinary individual or legislator has somehow come to take an interest. That they arise and become urgent in us of course does human nature unimpeachable credit and economics must by all means wait respectfully upon their settlement. So much is conceded. But economics is economics, when all is said and done. What we mean by the economic interest is an interest in the direct and several satisfactions that a man can get from the several things he shrewdly finds it worth his while to pay for. And shrewdness means nicety of calculation, accuracy of measurement in the determination of tangible loss and gain. Here, then, is no field for ethics but a field of fact. Thus ethics on her side must also wait until the case is fully ready for her praise or blame. Such is the modus vivendi. But its simplicity is oversimple and unreal. It pictures the "economic man" as bound in the chains of a perfunctory deference that he would throw off if he could. For the theory of constructive comparison or creative intelligence, on the other hand, instead of a seeker and recipient of "psychic income" and a calculator of gain and loss, he is a personal agent maintaining continuity of action in a life of discontinuously changing levels of interest and experience. His measure of attainment lies not in an accelerating rate of "psychic income," but in an increasing sense of personal effectiveness and an increasing readiness and confidence before new junctures.
The possession and use of commodities are, then, not in themselves and directly economic facts at all. As material things commodities serve certain purposes and effect certain results. They are means to ends and their serving so is a matter of technology. But do I seriously want their services? This is a matter of my ethical point of view. Do I want them at the price demanded or at what price and how many? This is the economic question and it obviously is a question wholly ethical in import—more broadly and inclusively ethical, in fact, than the ethical question in its earlier and more humanly inviting form. And what we have now to see is the fact that no consideration that has a bearing upon the problem in its ethical phase can lose its importance and relevance in the subsequent phase.
There can be no restriction of the economic interest, for example, to egoism. If on general principles I would really rather use goods produced in safe and cleanly factories or produced by "union labor," there is no possible reason why this should not incline me to pay the higher prices that such goods may cost and make the needful readjustment in my budget. Is there reason why my valuation of these goods should not thus be the decisive act that takes me out of one relation to industrial workers and sets me in another—can anything else, indeed, quite so distinctly do this? For economic valuation is only the fixation of a purchase price, or an exchange relation in terms of price and quantity, upon which two schemes of life, two differing perspectives of social contact and relationship converge—the scheme of life from which I am departing and the one upon which I have resolved to make my hazard. It is this election, this transition, that the purchase price expresses—drawing all the strands of interest and action into a knot so that a single grasp may seize them. The only essential egoism in the case lies in the "subjectivism" of the fact that inevitably the emergency and the act are mine and not another's. This is the "egocentric predicament" in its ethical aspect. And the egocentric predicament proves Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld as little as it proves Berkeley or Karl Pearson. No social interest, no objective interest of any sort, is shown ungenuine by my remembering in season that if I cannot fill my coal-bin I shall freeze.57
§ 15. This logical and psychological continuity of the ethical and economic problems suggests certain general considerations of some practical interest. In the first place as to "egoism." I am, let us say, an employer. If I am interested in procuring just "labor," in the sense of foot-pounds of energy, then undoubtedly labor performed under safe and healthful conditions is worth no more to me than other labor (provided it does not prove more efficient). But is this attitude of interest in just foot-pounds of energy the attitude par excellence or solely entitled to be called economic? And just this may be asserted for the reason that an exclusive interest in just labor is the only interest in the case that men of business, or at least many of them, can entertain without going speedily to the wall. If, then, I do in fact pay more than I must in wages or if I expend more than a bare minimum for conveniences and safety-guards this is not because of the valuation I put upon labor, but only because I take pleasure in the contentment and well-being of others. And this is not "business" but "uplift"—or else a subtle form of emotional self-indulgence. Suppose, however, that by legislation similar working conditions have been made mandatory for the entire industry and suppose that the community approves the law, even to the extent of cheerfully paying so much of the additional cost thereby imposed as may be shifted upon them.
Shall we say that this is an ethical intrusion into the sphere of economics or shall we say that the former economic demand for labor "as such" has given place to an economic demand for labor better circumstanced or better paid? The community at all events is paying the increase of price or a part of the increase. It seems arbitrary to insist that the old price is still the economic price of the commodity and the increase only the price of a quiet conscience. The notion of a strictly economic demand for labor pure and simple seems in fact a concept of accounting. To meet the community's demand for the commodity a number of producers were required. The least capable of these could make both ends meet at the prevailing price only by ignoring all but the severely impersonal aspects of the process. Taking these costs as a base, other more capable or more fortunate producers may have been able to make additional expenditures of the sort in question, charging these perhaps to "welfare" account. The law then intervenes, making labor in effect more expensive for all by requiring the superior conveniences or by compelling employers' insurance against accidents to workmen or by enforcing outright a higher minimum wage. The old basic labor cost becomes thus obsolete. And without prejudging as to the expediency of such legislation in particular industrial or business situations may we not protest against a priori and wholesale condemnation of such legislation as merely irresponsibly "ethical" and "unscientific"? Is it not, rather, economically experimental and constructive, amounting in substance to a simple insistence that henceforth the hiring and paying of labor shall express a wider range of social interests—shall signalize a more clearly self-validating level of comprehension, on the part of employers and consumers, of the social significance of industry than the old? And may we not protest also, as a matter of sheer logic, against carrying over a producer's distinction of accounting between "labor" cost and "welfare" cost into the consumer's valuation of the article? How and to what end shall a distinction be drawn between his "esteem" for the trimmed and isolated article and his esteem for the men who made it—which, taken together, dispose him to pay a certain undivided price for it?
For the egoism of men is no fixed and unalterable fact. Taking it as a postulate, a mathematical theory of market phenomena may be erected upon it, but such a postulate is purely formal, taking no note of the reasons which at any given time lie behind the individuals' "demand" or "supply schedules." It amounts simply to an assumption that these schedules will not change during the lapse of time contemplated in the problem in hand. And it therefore cannot serve as the basis for a social science. As an actual social phenomenon egoism is merely a disclosure of a certain present narrowness and inertness in the nature of the individual which may or may not be definitive for him. It is precisely on a par with anemia, dyspepsia or fatigue, or any other like unhappy fact of personal biography.
§ 16. There is another suggestion of ethical and economic continuity that may be briefly indicated. If our view of this relation is correct, a problem, by becoming economic, may lose something in dramatic interest and grandiosity but gains in precision and complexity. In the economic phase an issue becomes sensibly crucial. It is in this phase that are chiefly developed those qualities of clear-headedness, temperateness of thought and action, and well-founded self-reliance that are the foundation of all genuine personal morality and social effectiveness. And one may question therefore the ethical consequences of such measures as old age, sickness, and industrial accident insurance or insurance against unemployment. In proportion as these measures are effective they amount to a constant virtual addition to the individual's income from year to year without corresponding effort and forethought on his part. They may accordingly be condemned as systematic pauperization—the "endowment of the unfit." There is evidently a fundamental problem here at issue, apart from all administrative difficulties. Clearly this type of criticism assumes a permanent incapacity in "human nature" or in most actual beings therewith endowed, to recognize as seriously important other interests than those upon which hinge physical life and death. The ordinary man, it is believed, is held back from moral Quixotism as from material extravagance by the fear of starvation alone; and it is assumed that there are no other interests in the "normal" man that can or ever will be so wholesomely effective to these ends. And two remarks in answer appear not without a measure of pertinence. First, if what is alleged be true (and there is evidence in Malthus' Essay and elsewhere to support it) it seems less a proof of original sin and "inperfectibility" than a reproach to a social order whose collective tenor and institutions leave the mass untouched and unawakened above the level of animal reproduction and whose inequalities of opportunity prevent awakened life from growing strong. And second, the democratic society of the future, if it exempts the individual in part or wholly from the dread of premature physical extinction must leave him on higher levels of interest similarly dependent for success or failure upon his ultimate personal discretion. And is it inconceivable that on higher levels there should ever genuinely be such a persisting type of issue for the multitude of men?58
§ 17. We have held constructive comparison in its economic phase to be a reciprocal evaluating of the "salient members" of two budgets. The respective budgets in such a case express in the outcome (1) the plane of life to which one is to move and (2) the plane one is forsaking. It was the salient member of the former that presented the problem at the outset. In the course of the process its associates were gathered about it in their due proportions and perspective. The salient member of the latter (i.e., whatever the purchase is to oblige one to do without), it was the business of constructive comparison to single out from among its associates and designate for sacrifice. In any case at all departing from the type of substitution pure and simple, the commodities sacrificed will come to have a certain "value in exchange" that clearly is a new fact, a new judgment, in experience. This value in exchange, this "subjective" or "personal" exchange value, may fittingly be termed a "value for transition." The transition once made, the exchange once concluded, I shall deem the motor-car, for example, that I have not bought to replace one used-up, to be worth less than the piano I have bought instead. This indeed (in no disparaging sense) is a tautology. But does this lesser relative value equal or exceed or fall short of the value the car would have had if no question of a piano had been raised at all and I had bought it in replacement of the old one as a matter of course? How can one say? The question seems unmeaning, for the levels of value referred to are different and discontinuous and the magnitudes belong to different orders. In a word, because a "value for transition" marks a resolve and succinctly describes an act, it cannot be broken in two and expressed as an equating of two magnitudes independently definable apart from the relation. The motor-car had its value as a member of the old system—the piano has its value as a member of the new. "The piano is worth more than the car"; "the car is worth less than the piano"—these are the prospective and retrospective views across a gulf that separates two "specious presents," not judgments of static inequality in terms of a common measure.
Is value, then, absolute or relative? Is value or price the prior notion? Was the classical English economics superficial in its predilection for the relative conception of value? Or is the reigning Austrian economics profound in its reliance upon marginal utility? By way of answer let us ask—What in our world can be more absolute a fact than a man's transition from one level of experience and action to another? Can the flight of time be stayed or turned backward? And if not can the acts by whose intrinsic uniqueness and successiveness time becomes filled for me and by which I feel time's sensible passage as swift or slow, lose their individuality? But it is not by a mere empiric temporalism alone that the sufficient absoluteness of the present act is attested. My transition from phase to phase of "finitude" is a thing so absolute that Idealism itself has deemed an Absolute indispensable to assure its safe and sane achievement. And with all Idealism's distrust of immediate experience for every evidential use, the Idealist does not scruple to cite the "higher obviousness" of personal effort, attainment, and fruition as the best of evidence for his most momentous truth of all.59 And accordingly (in sharp descent) we need not hesitate to regard value in exchange as a primary fact in its own right, standing in no need of resolution into marginal pseudo-absolutes. A price agreed to and paid marks a real transition to another level. There are both marginal valuation and Werthaltung on this level, but they are subordinate incidents to this level's mapping and the conservation of its resources. On this level every marginal utility is relative, as we have seen, to every other through their common relation to the complex plan of organization as a whole.60
§ 18. In conclusion one more question closely related to the foregoing may be briefly touched upon. We have held that the individual's attitude toward a commodity is in the first instance one of putting a price-estimate upon it and only secondarily that of holding it in a provisionally settled marginal esteem. If this principle of the priority of price-estimation or exchange value is true, it seems evident that there can be no line of demarcation drawn (except for doubtfully expedient pedagogical purposes) between (1) "Subjective valuations" with which individuals are conceived to come to a market and (2) a mechanical equilibration of demand and supply which it is the distinctive and sole function of market concourse to effect. In such a view the market process in strict logic must be timeless as it is spaceless; a superposition of the two curves is effected and they are seen to cross in a common point which their shapes geometrically predetermine. Discussion, in any proper sense, can be no inherent part of a market process thus conceived. Once in the market, buyers and sellers can only declare their "subjective exchange valuations" of the commodity and await the outcome with a dispassionate certainty that whoever may gain by exchanging at the price to be determined, those who cannot exchange will at all events not lose. But considered as a typical likeness of men who have seen a thing they want and are seeking to possess it, this picture of mingled hope and resignation is not convincing. Most actual offering of goods for sale that one observes suggests less the dispassionate manner of the physiologist or psychologist taking the measure of his subject's reactions, sensibilities, and preferences than the more masterful procedure of the physician or the hypnotist who seeks to uproot or modify or reconstruct them. This is the process known in economic writing since Adam Smith as "the higgling and bargaining of the market."
In fact, the individual's ante-market valuation, when there temporarily is one, is an exchange valuation of the constructive or experimental and therefore (in any significant sense of the word) perfectly objective type, and the market process into which this enters is only a perfectly homogeneous temporal continuation of it that carries the individual forward to decisive action. There is no more reason for a separation here than for sundering the ante-experimental sketching out of an hypothesis in any branch of research from the work of putting the hypothesis to experimental test. The results of experiment may serve in a marked way in both sorts of process to elucidate or reconstruct the hypothesis.
The "higgling and bargaining of the market" has been accorded but scant attention by economists. It has apparently been regarded as a kind of irrelevance—a comedy part, at best, in the serious drama of industry and trade, never for a moment hindering the significant movement and outcome of the major action. As if to excuse the incompetence of this treatment (or as another phase of it) theory has tended to lay stress upon, and mildly to deplore, certain of the less amiable and engaging aspects of the process. The very term indeed as used by Adam Smith, imported a certain æsthetic disesteem, albeit tempered with indulgent approbation on other grounds. In Böhm-Bawerk's more modern account this approbation has given place to a neutral tolerance. A certain buyer, he says (in his discussion of simple "isolated" exchange), will give as much as thirty pounds for a horse; the horse's owner will take as little as ten pounds—these are predetermined and fixed valuations brought to the exchange negotiations and nothing that happens in the game of wits is conceived to modify them. The price will then be fixed 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 Böhm-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
§ 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 (§§ 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 (§ 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 (§§ 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 (§§ 8-12). There are apparently no valid objections to this view to be drawn from the current logical type of marginal-utility analysis (§ 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 (§ 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 (§ 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 (§ 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 (§ 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 (§ 18).
§ 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 STANDARDS64
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, coöperating, 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 καλόν 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 goël 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 φιλία 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, coöperating 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 superstitious methods and in analyzing situations and testing hypotheses, but the term is inadequate to do justice to that creative element in the formation of hypotheses which finds the new, and it tends to leave out of account the social point of view involved in the widening of the area of human intercourse. More will be said upon this point in connection with the discussion of rationalism.
(4) The process of judgment and choice. The elements are not the sum. The moral consciousness is not just the urge of life, plus the social relations, plus intelligence. The process of moral deliberation, evaluation, judgment, and choice is itself essential. In this process are born the concepts and standards good and right, and likewise the moral self which utters the judgment. It is in this twofold respect synthetic, creative. It is as an interpretation of this process that the concept of freedom arises. Four aspects of the process may be noted.
(a) The process involves holding possibilities of action, or objects for valuation, or ends for choice, in consciousness and measuring them one against another in a simultaneous field—or in a field of alternating objects, any of which can be continually recalled. One possibility after another may be tried out in anticipation and its relations successively considered, but the comparison is essential to the complete moral consciousness.
(b) The process yields a universe of valued objects as distinguished from a subjective consciousness of desires and feelings. We say, "This is right," "That is good." Every "is" in such judgments may be denied by an "is not" and we hold one alternative to be true, the other false. As the market or the stock exchange or board of trade fixes values by a meeting of buyers and sellers and settles the price of wheat accurately enough to enable farmers to decide how much land to seed for the next season, so the world of men and women who must live together and coöperate, or fight and perish, forces upon consciousness the necessity of adjustment. The preliminary approaches are usually hesitant and subjective—like the offers or bids in the market—e.g., "I should like to go to college; I believe that is a good thing"; "My parents need my help; it does not seem right to leave them." The judgments finally emerge. "A college education is good;" "It is wrong to leave my parents"—both seemingly objective yet conflicting, and unless I can secure both I must seemingly forego actual objective good, or commit actual wrong.
(c) The process may be described also as one of "universalizing" the judging consciousness. For it is a counterpart of the objective implication of a judgment that it is not an affirmation as to any individual's opinion. This negative characterization of the judgment is commonly converted into the positive doctrine that any one who is unprejudiced and equally well informed would make the same judgment. Strictly speaking the judgment itself represents in its completed form the elimination of the private attitude rather than the express inclusion of other judges. But in the making of the judgment it is probable that this elimination of the private is reached by a mental reference to other persons and their attitudes, if not by an actual conversation with another. It is dubious whether an individual that had never communicated with another would get the distinction between a private subjective attitude and the "general" or objective.
Moreover, one form of the moral judgment: "This is right," speaks the language of law—of the collective judgment, or of the judge who hears both sides but is neither. This generalizing or universalizing is frequently supposed to be the characteristic activity of "reason." I believe that a comparison with the kindred value judgments in economics supports the doctrine that in judgments as to the good as well as in those as to right, there is no product of any simple faculty, but rather a synthetic process in which the social factor is prominent. A compelling motive toward an objective and universal judgment is found in the practical conditions of moral judgments. Unless men agree on such fundamental things as killing, stealing, and sex relations they cannot get on together. Not that when I say, "Killing is wrong," I mean to affirm "I agree with you in objecting to it"; but that the necessity (a) of acting as if I either do or do not approve it, and (b) of either making my attitude agree with yours, or yours agree with mine, or of fighting it out with you or with the whole force of organized society, compels me to put my attitude into objective terms, to meet you and society on a common platform. This is a synthesis, an achievement. To attribute the synthesis to any faculty of "practical reason," adds nothing to our information, but tends rather to obscure the facts.
(d) The process is thus a reciprocal process of valuing objects and of constructing and reconstructing a self. The object as first imaged or anticipated undergoes enlargement and change as it is put into relations to other objects and as the consequences of adoption or rejection are tried in anticipation. The self by reflecting and by enlarging its scope is similarly enlarged. It is the resulting self which is the final valuer. The values of most objects are at first fixed for us by instinct or they are suggested by the ethos and mores of our groups—family, society, national religions, and "reign under the appearance of habitual self-suggested tendencies." The self is constituted accordingly. Collisions with other selves, conflicts between group valuations and standards and individual impulses or desires, failure of old standards as applied to new situations, bring about a more conscious definition of purposes. The agent identifies himself with these purposes, and values objects with reference to them. In this process of revaluing and defining, of comparing and anticipation, freedom is found if anywhere. For if the process is a real one the elements do not remain unaffected by their relation to each other and to the whole. The act is not determined by any single antecedent or by the sum of antecedents. It is determined by the process. The self is not made wholly by heredity, or environment. It is itself creating for each of its elements a new environment, viz., the process of reflection and choice. And if man can change the heredity of pigeons and race horses by suitable selection, if every scientific experiment is a varying of conditions, it is at least plausible that man can guide his own acts by intelligence, and revise his values by criticism.