Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/447

433 the performance of those functions which society is selecting in its progressive definition of life in terms of function. The individual obtains his own definition of life from his social, or psychical environment, and by his choices identifies his life with the functions consequent upon his definition. Life and personality become one; but to say that the end is life is less significant of the process than to say that it is personality. To define the end in terms of life is much the same as to define a watch in terms of brass and nickel, and to regard escapement, balance-wheel, and main-spring as so many specialized forms of mechanism by means of which time-keepers are seeking the conservation of metal.

(2) Is survival an adequate criterion of moral value? Here we are met by an inevitable antinomy between the ideal and the actual, the 'ought' to be and the 'is'; and it seems that from the very nature of morality the contrast must be absolute. Yet that which ought to be is necessarily determined causally within the limits of what is possible of realization with reference to conditions which obtain within the actual, conditions that are the result of a continuous process of evolution. And if evolution applies within the sphere of morality, one must hold that what shall be is determined, or has its determinate place, with respect to what has been, or, in other words, that the future is in principle continuous with the past. In this case the ought to be would signify, (a) merely individual recognition of the unattainable, or (b) more or less adequate prevision of the future for which natural selection and survival provide the means. But natural selection is, we have seen, relative to the higher, not to the lower environment; or modes of conduct are selected not with regard to conditions that have become fixed in stereotyped forms, but with reference to a complex social and psychical environment which is always in advance of these.

And this is the reason why the record of the past can never accurately forecast the end ; for of the social medium which determines always, in its relation to the individual, the direction which evolution shall take, the individual alone is the interpreter. The goal remains an individual one, but the creation of the type is the primary condition of the existence of the individual, and