Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/278

262 that would mean the defeat of the value process itself, and the loss of the sense of value but rather the reduction to zero of internal contradiction, or, as Bradley expresses it, the attainment of the zero of unused and unsystematized volitional energy.

From the preceding considerations of the different rôle of the negative moment in the individual and social value-functions we get some insight into the extent of this principle of phenomenal indifference of the two series. We see how it is possible that these very mutations of phenomenal social values may afford the socionomic conditions for the development of relatively independent individual series. The rise and decline of any phenomenal social values, the struggle for existence of these values with each other, afford the social conditions of opposition and contrast which make possible the development of the individual series with its personal meaning. The personal series is relatively indifferent to particular social content. Its values are functions of two volitional moments of affirmation or expansion, and of negation or intensity; and the oppositions and isolations produced by the social process afford the conditions for the realization of both moments indefinitely. This indifference extends, then, only so far as the formulation of the phenomenal laws of the mutation of content. In an ultimate metaphysic, the interrelation of the two series and the harmony of the two measures of value would again reappear.

As to the isolations and oppositions which are the conditions of the imputation of absolute values in the personality, it is clear that they must be given an epistemological significance. The meaning of 'inner peace' and 'tragical elevation' cannot be derived from the objective principles of social value. Like all absolute moments in the individual series, they must either be given an epistemological significance—and then they point to a qualitative law of the individual series relatively indifferent to the quantitative principles of the social series—or they must be reduced to æsthetic illusion. We have seen that these absolute moments get a significance only when the individual is æsthetically isolated from the system of social forces. Even so it is. Viewed from the standpoint of the social system, these imputed personal values