Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/265

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HE preceding paper was concerned with the difficulties and contradictions that arise in attempting to apply the principles of the personal value series to the explanation of the origin and mutations of social-values, or in attempting, on the other hand, to account for the meaning of the personal series and its principles in terms of the objective, quantitative methods applied to the study of the social series. In either case such contradictions arose that there seemed to be at least a critical, negative basis for the theory of relative indifference of the laws of the two series. This was expressed in terms of a dualistic application of the principle of rational sufficiency. A point was reached in the discussion where it was seen that neither the principle of 'increase of value,' nor that of 'equivalence of value,' both of which are fundamental in the sanctioning consciousness of the individual in the personal value-series, can find phenomenal application in the objective social series. They were reduced to principles of the individual. It was seen also that this situation arises out of the fact that there is no common term of measurement to which the two series can be reduced, because the abstraction of the social series of values from the personal bearers of values, and its treatment as part of the system of nature, requires us to think of its values as subject merely to the laws of transformation and mutation, and not capable of increase, while the inmost meaning of the personal series is that it imputes increasing value on the assumption of indefinite increase of valuing energy.

This imputation of increasing personal value, concomitantly with the expansion or extension of a disposition in the personality, is conceivable only on the theory that the processes of which value is a function must differ in the personal and social series in such a way that value must have a different meaning in the two spheres.