Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/525

507 the growth of personality in rational self-consciousness is a deepening of the sense of personal worth. This is the only intrinsic end which a teleological ethics can recognize, and when confusion exists or conflict arises between personal tendencies, the ultimate standard must be the principle of restitution, at higher levels, of personal harmony, which, of course, will generally be found to involve a social reference.

Hand in hand with the deepening of the sense of the inherent worth of conscious personality there goes a widening of the scope for individual development. A rationally constituted society must give play and opportunity for individuality, and it is better able to do so when there is, on the one hand, a clearer and more systematic knowledge of the indispensable minimal principles of social and constitutional life, i.e., of social morality, and, on the other hand, a deeper insight into the nature of personal values.

The outcome of recognizing the fundamental distinction and relation between the social framework of conduct and the inward and personal nature of intrinsic values, must be the admission that there is no absolute standard of ethical valuation outside the reflective affirmations of persons. It follows that 'goods' are many in kind and have no common measure except their relations to conscious selves. It is true, of course, that all individual values have a possible social aspect. It is also true that social organization and life are instruments for the actualization of personal values. Hence those principles of social morality which are necessary to stable and harmonious social organization are relatively high teleological values. There are social qualities, not definable in terms of law or maxim, that are nevertheless normal conditions of the highest personal or ethical development, and that possess still higher value than the well-defined principles of institutional morality, since they are conditions of that harmonious intercommunication of persons which seems to be an integral aspect of the highest good. Such social qualities are urbanity of manners, the refined perceptions and feelings indispensable to the fullest friendships, etc. Many pleasures, too, such as those of æsthetic enjoyment and social recreation, and even those of physical well-being and recreation, have high ethical value, since under