Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/268

252 attitudes and dispositions, and particularly the attainment of such absolute personal values as perfection, inner peace, and freedom, are the ultimate sanctions of individual valuation, but he conceives that the absolute moments in these personal values can be explained as Wirkungs-werthe, as complementary values arising out of the harmony of social values in the individual. Can these absolute values of the personality, these values imputed over and above the social value of particular acts and dispositions, be explained in terms of the quantitative principles of the social series, or do they require to be conceived in terms of some qualitative law of the personal series, relatively indifferent to the laws of the social series?

It can be shown, I think, first of all, that the principle introduced by the economist-moralists to account for the phenomena of personal sanction, and for the absolute moment in the personal series, is not quantitative but aesthetic and qualitative; and that the first point of indifference appears in the fact that the two measures of value are not reducible to each other. In the second place, the ideal personal values that arise in the working out of the qualitative law of the individual series have the absolute moment only in the aesthetic isolation of the personality. They are more or less indifferent from the standpoint of the social series. Conceived as complementary values, they occupy the peculiar position of an epiphenomenon that does not affect the mutations of the social series. Thirdly, it can be shown that the indefinite development of these personal values is to such an extent independent of the social values and their mutations, is so much a function of the personality, that it may be realized irrespective of the phenomenal content derived from the sphere of social values. Thus the highest personal values may arise from the development in the individual of dispositions indifferent to the social valuation of the time.

The first point at which this relative indifference of the personal and social values appears is, then, in the difference in nature of their generating principles and the measures derived from them. We have seen that every value-reaction of the subject has its two aspects, an inner and an outer meaning. In its outer aspect, its