Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/142

126 of idealism, eliminating the temporal moment, or minimizing the difficulties which arise out of the fact that the self and its individual value series is phenomenally a process in time occupying but a moment in the larger world order, seek to sanction or ground this individual series in the larger world process. It is clear, however, that even if Green's famous fifth chapter in the third book of the Prolegomena represents the ideal truth of human progress, even if, despite temporal mutations in values, there are certain ones ultimately permanent, such a view nevertheless ignores the essential problem of any individual self at any given time in history. For it ignores the mutations of value due to causal and economic laws, and it is precisely with these mutations that the individual consciousness must be concerned if it is to get its sanction, in any sense, out of the objective series or world order. The system of social values is a vast one, and, though its general direction may perhaps be metaphysically conceived as in the direction of the attainment of permanent values and of infinite increase of value, yet its actual curve shows many depressions, and it may be in one of these depressions that the entire individual series runs its course. The individual must express his meaning, affirm his values; and the problem remains to discover to what extent the social objective series, abstracted as a system of nature in time, admits of this expression, this affirmation. There are reasons for thinking that the phenomenal applications in time, of the principles of the individual value series, may involve contradictions which argue for a relative indifference of the two series to each other.

The other method of procedure approaches the problem, as we have seen, in the reverse order. It starts with the system of nature and its laws, with the real in its deterministic aspect, and seeks to reduce the values of the individual to aspects or phases of these laws. Such meanings or values as it does not find therein realized it calls illusory. Now, while not differing in principle from the earlier doctrines of the relativity of values, more recent theories of value have developed certain details of formulation, which have an important bearing upon this general question of the relation of the individual to the social value