Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/523

505 unstinted devotion on the part of scholar and investigator. The Greek love of is not widely regarded among us as conferring ethical worth on persons.

The comparative study of typical and significant personal valuations at critical turning points in the evolution of ethical thought must, of course, be interpreted in the light of the rational value-judgments of persons under the actual conditions of the ethical life to-day. A comparative enquiry such as I have suggested would be meaningless were its outcome the submission of living problems and principles to past types of valuation. The results of such an historical investigation gain actual significance and application only in so far as they are taken up into a living ethical consciousness. On the other hand, our present instinctive and unreflecting intuitions have had a history, and are, in part at least, the resultants of moral evolution. No further progress in the direction of reflective harmony in the principles of conduct is possible without an understanding of their history. And, in so far as the inconsistency and confusion of our intuitive value judgments is due to warring elements of moral tradition, to understand the past is to be freed from it.

The critical study of the historical mutations of ethical values in the course of civilization most clearly points to the individual person as a center of origination and an ultimate criterion of those value-judgments in which conventional morals are transcended and higher levels of ethical insight established. No form of historical conflict goes deeper or is more frequently recurrent than that between customary morality and a deeper insight on the part of individuals.

The very confusion which obtains to-day in contrast with the greater simplicity and clearness of primitive Christian or mediæval ethics witnesses the truth of this principle. Just as the chaotic individualism of the Sophistic period was the pre-condition of a deeper and more rational ethical self-consciousness among the Greeks, so it is to-day. The last word of comparative historical