Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/519

501 natural individual as an unthinking center of desire and impulse. No doubt the relation of the individual to society is an important problem for systematic ethics as well as for politics. But the rational person, as I understand him, is always a socialised self, and personal values must include what are commonly distinguished as individual and social values. I mean by personal values all feelings and practical affirmations of intrinsic values which issue from and inhere in rational, self-conscious, individuals. In this sense the affirmation of self-sacrifice in the interests of science or of humanity is just as truly a personal value as the affirmation of an impulse to æsthetic activity in the face of a filial obligation.

Hence the scope of ethics is wider than that of the scientific study of social morals. The latter arises from the consideration of maxims and judgments which, however they may have originated, now prevail through the authority of the social will, and as such may be recognized by the individual will as rational or irrational. Its principles refer to generalized social types of action, i.e., to a certain set of principles of practical judgment and obligation that have come to prevail by reason of their actual or supposed indispensableness to the maintenance and development of the social organization. In other words, the empirical study of morals is chiefly concerned with socially authoritative principles of action. Ethics, on the other hand, includes the consideration of all intrinsic personal valuations or goods, some of which, as, for example, æsthetic enjoyment or philosophical contemplation, may have no obvious social reference whatsoever.

When we pass beyond the standpoint of customary morality to the finer nuances of ethical thinking and feeling, we enter a realm of intrinsic values that can neither be fully explained from, or conceived in, terms of anything other than the inner reactions of rational persons to situations that call for conscious deeds. These personal reactions may be classified in three series, according as the attitudes refer predominantly to the doer's own inner condition as the determining end, or to the psychical states of other personalities, or to seemingly impersonal goods, such as art, science, etc. These three series of values refer to