Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/517

499 beyond these accepted social values are the critical attitudes of self-conscious persons. The individual spirit is an originating center of ethical judgment and action, and for ethics the reflective individual, capable of independent insight and self-determining action in the light of his own rational insight, should be the center of primary consideration and ultimate reference. Ethics is in part a comparative historical science, but it should find and investigate its fundamental problems, not only by emphasis of the institutional or social aspect of the individual, but as well by reference to the individual himself as the source of ethical value-judgments. It is a sociological problem as to how institutional morality is evolved and maintained. It is, par excellence, an ethical problem as to how in a changing or relatively stable social structure, as the case may be, the individual may realize and express personal values. There are, it seems to me, three distinct levels of moral activity alike in the history of the race and of the individual. First is the purely reflex or unconscious social or tribal morality of unreflecting selves who are simply passive organs of the 'tribal self.' At this level men unthinkingly obey the conventional or customary morality of their clan, tribe, city, or nation. Their moral ideas are reverberations of tribal judgments of custom and utility. The passage from this first level to the second level is mediated by the conflict which ensues between the desires and interests of the individual and the morality of tribal custom. In and through this conflict self-conscious rationality is engendered. The second principal level of morality is that in which the individual consciously and reflectively identifies his own interests and standards of action with those of society. At this level the self becomes aware of the rationality of social or institutional morals. He has gained an insight into the rationale of custom. He finds a larger life for himself through action in harmony with the social reason, i.e., with mind objectified in moral institutions.

But there now arises the consciousness of the imperfect rationality of existing customary moral institutions, and the transition from the second to the third level of moral activity is mediated by the discovery of a gap and, sometimes, of a conflict between