Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/147

No. 2.] doubtless been impressed with this effort of the dramatic sense to free itself from the old objective and quasi-physical concept of justice, which has been the backbone of so much of the tragic. Having given up the idea of an objective, social, or metaphysical justice, he takes refuge in an inner mystical conception which makes justice indifferent to the system of nature. But this conception, that the indifference of nature to the ethical values of the individual Self may be made an hypothesis upon which to construct an idealistic theory of values, has actually received philosophical expression in the two great representatives of the most modern philosophy of value. Nietzsche and Guyau, different as are the values which they succeed in finally affirming, are at one on this fundamental point, that what are illusions from the standpoint of the system of nature are, in the system of values, fundamentally true. The usefulness of these values for life is their ultimate test. Indifferent to the causality of history and nature alike, and also to the social values which this social system has produced, the individual subject of values is to find in the nature of his own series its sufficient reason and justification. But while Nietzsche's pragmatic affirmation of this doctrine represents a significant undercurrent in thought, Guyau's formulation is of more importance for our study, because he brings the problem down to the plane of an epistemological examination of the valuing consciousness itself. In his study of morality, he examines, in turn, the optimistic and pessimistic views of the world order, as hypothetical bases of ethical values. He concludes that neither of these, were it capable of rational proof, as it is not, is, in so far as it is a theory of the system of nature objectively viewed, a sufficient ground for ethical values.

In consequence of contradictions similar to those discussed above, he decides in favor of the hypothesis of "indifference of ethical values to the system of nature." The sanction of the individual's ethical values is to be found alone in the concrete activity of life itself, in life not viewed as a phenomenon to be judged externally as part of a system of nature, but as containing