Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/148

132 in itself its own principle of valuation, its own sufficiency. The consequence of this principle of indifference is the banishment from the sphere of ethical values of the principles of causal sanction and of distributive justice. In so far as under these rubrics the system of nature is conceived to be the source of sanction of individual ethical values, our conception is in error. There is no immediate bond, either causal or rational, between ethical values as values and social values as part of a system of nature. Having handed over to a morally indifferent nature, manifesting itself in economic laws, all the truth there is in the quantitative conceptions of causal sanction and distributive justice, he seeks to construct out of the inner dialectic of the processes of life itself, as a more ultimate reality than the abstractions of external nature, its own sufficient reason. This inner norm, independent of the fate of values in the system of nature, is found in increased intensity of life, volitional, emotional, and intellectual, which has as its correlative and condition the most complete expansion. In interpreting individual value as a function of activity, and indeed as a function of these two processes of intensity and expansion, he does not, it is to be observed, conceive of intensity and expansion as related to each other as in the logic of formal thought, nor yet as the intensity and extensity of demand and supply in the economy of material goods. They do not vary inversely but directly. Guyau clearly conceives of the possibility of an indefinite increase of sympathy both in intensity and extension, and, through the medium of the æsthetic values, without the point of satiety, of an indefinite increase of social synergy. This position is similar to that taken by Tarde in a recent article in the Revue Philosophique, where he argues for an indefinite increase of energy of social belief and confidence, as possible through the development of æsthetic goods in which satisfaction is not limited by the economic laws of consumption.

That which interests us in this doctrine of Guyau is his effort to recognize the characteristic law of the Self's individual value series, and at the same time to do justice to the causal principles that rule the social value series when abstracted as a part of the system of nature. This characteristic law he defines as a