Page:Philosophical Review Volume 11.djvu/279

No. 3.] out of which the personal and ethical standard gets its sanctions, must, as Ehrenfels admits, be denominated indifferent They are epiphenomenal. From the phenomenal point of view it is quite admissible that they should be so. But it is equally certain that ultimately the self-consistent meaning of the individual series must have a basis in reality. To call these absolute moments in inner valuation æsthetic illusion solves no problems. The concept of æsthetic illusion is itself full of epistemological contradictions that can only be solved by giving the æsthetic a place in our system of knowledge and reality. Just what is the place of the æsthetic moment in knowledge and ethical values is an interesting problem which the limits of this discussion will not allow us to follow out. That it will call out more and more thought in the near future seems certain. The effort of Professor Ormond to restore the æsthetic moment in all thought is significant in this connection. As in the biological sphere it has been necessary to introduce the factor of isolation to account for the origin and fixation of characters of selective value, so in the sphere of ethics this factor of isolation, which manifests itself in what has been called the 'æesthetic' moment, will have to be taken into account. Nor can we here follow out the metaphysical implications of this conception of relative indifference. If these lead us in the direction of a certain individualism, this simply means that the full meaning of the individual must be reckoned with in any ultimate unification of the two value series. The over-balance of the objective method, sociological and economic, in ethical studies has obscured some elements of the problem, and it seemed desirable to bring these together in the form of an opposing thesis. Imitation is a surface category which, while it can account for the distribution of the contents for valuation, cannot account for the functions of valuation themselves. These lie deeper, and an examination of the principles of sufficiency in inner valuation discloses a meaning which cannot be identified with the meaning of the outer series without reducing one or the other to illusion. The relative indifference of the two series, in the sense here described, seems to be a methodological principle at least worth considering.