Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/273

No. 3.] unity and peace, through the harmonization of his particular group of phenomenal values, and, as we shall see in a later paragraph, a harmonization of inner values, aspiring or outlived, may set the personality in opposition to the normal values in the social series, and the absolute moment in personal valuation be attained in the sense of tragical elevation. These facts—that the absolute moments of inner peace and harmony and tragical elevation may be attained in connection with such different groups of social values—point to a relative indifference of the processes of inner valuation to the nature of their content. Whatever contents the mutations of the social series may deliver to the self, the form of selfhood has in itself its characteristic qualitative sanction. In Bradley's terms, ethical valuation, with its characteristic categories, is a function solely of the personal series.

The points at which the individual and social value-series seem to show a phenomenal indifference to each other have now been sufficiently examined to admit of a closer study of the qualitative principle which is conceived to rule in the personal series, and of its corresponding norms. The keynote of all those systems that have sought to do justice to the meaning of inner personal values, is an insistence upon the conception that increase in the expansion or extension (toward universalization) of a personal worth is accompanied by increase in meaning or intension of the value. This formulation is so constant throughout post-Kantian philosophy that it may almost claim to be raised to the position of an established law or norm of ethical values. This unanimity is the more significant in that it is concerned with a conception that goes deeper than the differences of emphasis upon intellectual, emotional, or volitional aspects of experience. The apperceptive energy of Wundt, the concrete ideas of Green and Bradley, the æsthetic ideas of Herbart, and the sentiments of Guyau, all are conceived as following this law. Wherever inner values are conceived to be the expression of a creative spiritual principle, there the norm of value is described in these terms, and is thus contrasted with the economic principles which determine objective values, more particularly the principle of limiting value, according to which as a disposition expands in the social consciousness