Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/153

No. 2.] which denies increase of value and energy, and contemplates merely transformation, displacement, and re-arrangement. In my monograph, History of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, etc., it was pointed out that while this principle arose in an identification of reality and value, in a metaphysical attempt to evaluate the total world, the entire history of reflection upon the principle has nevertheless resulted in a tendency to eliminate the worth-categories in favor of a mechanization of the principle. This ejection of the worth-categories resulted ultimately in a formulation, for the purposes of logic, of a dualistic application of the law. On the one hand, in the terms of Wundt, the Law of Ground reduces itself, in its application to external reality, to a principle of equivalence of forces, based upon conservation of energy. On the other hand, the inner sufficiency of judgment and will is concerned with equivalences of value, and assumes an infinite increase of mental energy. The latter is the inner sufficiency of the will, the former is an application of the principle of sufficiency to a system of nature abstracted from the inner meaning and sufficiency. Whatever be their ultimate union in an idealistic metaphysic, methodologically they remain dualistic.

Now, that there is an ultimate dualism in reason, and, consequently an ultimate difference of these two series of values, is highly improbable. Certainly the present writer, fresh from the reading of Professor Royce's second volume of The World and the Individual, has no desire so to argue. At the same time, as a methodological principle, this hypothesis of the relative indifference of the individual series of values, as a series, to the content and mutations of content in the social series, may be made fruitful for the understanding of certain questions that arise on the lower plane of the scientific study of ethical values. It deserves consideration in the same manner as the principle of psycho-physical parallelism—as an epistemological modus vivendi. It is the purpose of the second portion of this paper to seek to discover the precise meaning that may be given to this concept of indifference, and the extent of its application. This will involve a critical study of the concept of simultaneous increase in