Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/266

250 Such a conception implies also that the measure of value in the two cases must differ, and in such a way too that the imputation of the increasing value of a disposition shall so arise from its relation to the personality as to be relatively indifferent to the estimation of its value in the social series. This distinction is of the utmost importance in Bradley's Ethical Studies, where ethical valuation is conceived to be a function of personality alone, while, strictly speaking, the universe as a whole, as a system of nature, can be estimated only in intellectual terms as a contradictionless whole of experience and intuition. While the estimation of social values, abstracted from personalities, cannot avoid the quantitative measurement of phenomenal values in terms of the two variables, their expansion in social groups, and the intensity of energy of valuation (therefore in terms of supply and demand), the estimation of value in the personal series is a function of the systematization and harmonization of the ideal content and of the volitional energies of the personality. In the estimation of social values and their progress, we can scarcely avoid the distinctions of more and less, but in the estimation of personal values the criterion is purely qualitative, and the infinite or absolute moment is the qualitative infinite of perfection or harmony.

In order to bring this conception down to a plane where this relative indifference may be worked out in detail, we may restate the preceding distinction as follows. Every judgment of value, or indeed every value reactions of a personality, has two aspects, its inner and its outer meaning. As a phenomenon of the social series, it contributes to the mutation of values according to the laws of objective values, by modifying, be it ever so slightly, the relation of expansion to intensity. On the other hand, this judgment or reaction contributes to the realization of the individual series a meaning or a value out of all proportion to its significance in the social series, or indeed, as will be seen later, a value often contrary to that which it gets in the social series. Thus, as Meinong points out, increase of altruistic disposition in an individual may have a meaning, a value for the personality, in the direction of unification and harmonization of the affective and volitional life, out of all proportion to the value it gets in the social