Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/198

182 direct biological utility, his later and loftier values are of utility for the fullest realization of all within him that prompts to achievement. The higher sentimental values are constantly reconstructed and enlarged to meet the demands of new situations. A last objection needs to be met. If this hypothesis that values have evolved from instincts can be combined with so many different biological and philosophical conceptions, does it not dangerously approach the defects of a perfect hypothesis? May it not be safely ignored in discussions of more fundamental questions since, even if true, it is irrelevant to them?

This objection has already been anticipated in part. While biological mechanists and vitalists, and philosophical idealists, realists and pragmatists may all accept the theory if they wish, there is no one of these positions that will not be affected by its acceptance. The mechanist will have to regard values, or at least their neural substrates, as of actual significance in the economy of the organism. The vitalist will have to maintain continuity between instincts and intelligence via the sentiments, and not superimpose the latter on the former. The idealist, whether he believes in the priority of facts over values, or of values over facts, will in either case have to show how values grow out of more primitive psychical processes, maintain a continuity between the two, and not split the universe into dualisms of description and appreciation, reality and appearance, or what not. The realist will also have to avoid dualisms and maintain an evolutionary conception of values. The pragmatist will have to discriminate between 'situations,' and recognize that human beings have deep-seated instinctive and conative tendencies that are little if at all modifiable by the experiential situations into which they enter, and that the reconstruction that takes place in situations is an adjustment and adaptation of the more fragile and instable elements within the situation to those that are stiff and unyielding.