Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/149

No. 2.] increase in both intensity and expansion of life, of the volitional and affective dispositions of the subject. The sufficient reason of this individual series, if sufficient reason it may be called, consists precisely in this function. No value of the subject can find its sanction in the content of the social series. The fate of no objective value can essentially affect the significance of the subject's value series. The theory expressly discards all objective sanction whether causal or rational. Now, whatever may be the arguments for abandoning the conception of objective sanctions, they can all be traced back to contradictions which arise necessarily out of the attempt to carry principles of inner valuation over into the objective series conceived as a system of nature. An examination of these principles from a more logical point of view will enable us to understand the epistemological meaning of a theory of indifference.

The evaluating consciousness discloses two principles of valuation, 'equivalence of value,' and 'increase of value.' An act of volition may get its ground or sanction by establishing an equivalence of value between the act and some already accepted value. This equivalence may be conceived as being established merely between processes of the subject, as for instance, equivalence in the intension and extension of ideas or sentiments, or as an equivalence between a subjective and an objective value. There is also a second aspect of the sanctioning consciousness which consists in the imputation of increase of value to the willing subject, or his states of consciousness, on the assumption of the possibility of continuous increase of value. Now, the difficulties involved in conceiving these principles of sanction as depending for their meaning and their realization upon the causal constitution of the objective social value series, may be stated in the following general terms. In the first place, the principle of 'equivalence of values,' if it contemplates the establishment of equivalences between individual and social values, therefore, objective, causal, sanction and distributive justice, involves the reduction of both series to an abstract quantitative or logical middle term. Both of the classical doctrines of sanction follow this procedure. The hedonistic doctrine seeks to find in