Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/271

No. 3.] . Here, then, the relative indifference of the measures of value of the two series becomes clear. The psychological principles that are brought into account for the outer aspect of an individual's value reactions do not account for the personal measure of their value. The relative indifference of the two value-series appears, secondly, in what we have described as the indifference of the social series to the fate of personal values. From this point of view, the personal values seem often to play the role of epiphenomena. The working of the principle of harmonious grouping in the personality may produce, as complementary values, increase of dispositions, and may generate new dispositions, in which process the subject realizes values which have no appreciable meaning or value from the standpoint of social values. They are not instrumental values for society; that is, an increase of value through the harmonization of inner dispositions, imputed to the personality, is not, from the social point of view, correspondingly imputed to the individual acts. Thus the sense of inner peace, of great meaning and value to the subject, may arise in connection with an inner harmony of outlived social values, of little or no significance from the social point of view. From the standpoint of objective progress, such personal values, to the extent that they have merely individual meaning, are luxuries. Our valuation of them is possible only by an isolation of the individual, as an objective personality, from the series of social values. The important point is whether this isolation has an ultimate epistemological significance, or is, as Ehrenfels describes it, mere aesthetic illusion. The facts themselves, however, force him to recognize a certain relative indifference of personal and social values. An impartial observation of the empirical data, he tells us, shows that the concepts, social-ethical and individual-ethical, are only partially and occasionally identical, that, as a matter of fact, "there are certain dispositions and actions that come under the concept of the individual-moral which, from the standpoint of social ethics, must be designated indifferent."

Finally, we may observe a relative indifference, on the side of