Page:Philosophical Review Volume 15.djvu/527

509 And the ethical life of a conscious and rational individual represents a series of oscillations about certain fundamental normative tendencies of action. Intrinsic ethical worth belongs only to persons. But the individual wins inner depth and harmony of spirit through choice and action in the direction of over-individual or rational tendencies. There are types or general standards of personal valuation which undergo mutation and development in the direction of clearness and harmony by the immanent activity of reason itself. The evolution of types of ethical value-judgment is the evolution of personality itself; and this means the evolution of psychic individuality through the instrumentality of reason. Ethical valuations are practical judgments of selves that are moving in the direction of an ideal spiritual type at once concretely individual and ideally social.

Hence an ethics on a comparative or historical basis will not have the endless task of registering a chaos of atomistic and unrelated affirmations of worth, but of tracing, in the shifting and oscillation of personal values from Greece and Judæa to the Mediæval world, and from the Mediæval world through the Renaissance to the present time, certain general tendencies of ethical movement that become more clearly defined and articulated in the course of moral evolution. Such an ethics should enable us more rationally to harmonize and control our actual ethical judgments. It may furnish methods by which concrete judgments can be made in the light of certain type-forms. From a concrete historical study of the actual evolution of ideals of conduct we may more definitely learn how justice, truth-telling and truth-doing, benevolence, continence, etc., may be defined with reference to specific situations. And, on the other hand, since ethical judgments appear in the light of this enquiry as practical expressions of an historical reason, working in and through individuals, or as phases in the conscious and reflective evolution of personal life towards greater harmony and permanence of type, the relativity of ethical judgments, revealed by comparative history, is at the same time interpreted in terms of the dynamic ethical universal embodied in the movement of the personal life through reason towards fuller reasonableness.