Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/520

502 types of intrinsic goods and, although they need not be mutually exclusive, their contemporaneous attainment may be incompatible for many individuals in certain situations of their lives. A social or impersonal end may claim precedence over a private end, etc. My own æsthetic culture may conflict with filial obligations, or my work as philosopher or scientist may conflict with both æsthetic culture and filial duty. Nevertheless, these three types of goods alike refer to value-judgments of persons. Ultimately their goodness derives from no other source than personal affirmations of value made in the light of rational consideration. In this sense all ethical valuation is a personal judgment, and there is no intrinsic worth whose norm can be found outside a personal attitude.

In this connection the comparative historical interpretation of ethical judgments, as recorded in action and in literature, with reference to the concept of personality as ultimate source of valuation, furnishes valuable illustrative material and suggestion for a theory of ethics that shall do full justice to the concrete character of self-conscious personality and shall allow fuller scope to individual diversity in the evolutionary movement of civilization. A comparative consideration of the ethical role of individuality in history must deliver us from rigid dogmatic conceptions of a single highest good or type of obligation definable in exact terms. We see that the highest 'good' is a purely formal concept. Ethics must become relativistic and teleological in content when it is recognized by a thoroughgoing comparative criticism that the final center of valuation is personality in evolution. The comparative study of personal valuations in history will prove most suggestive when it is made with chief reference to the transformation of personal values that find utterance in critical and significant epochs of spiritual evolution and in the lives of men of world-historical spiritual significance. How instructive, for instance, it is to compare the self-consciousness which expresses itself in the feeling for honor amongst men like Dante and Petrarch with the attitude of representative mediæval men, such as St. Bernard or St. Francis of Assisi, to study the clash of two partly antithetical systems of value in Savonarola, and to