Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/177

No. 2.] even here we cannot overlook the feeling side; and this is especially evident when we come to the question of excluding that which breaks the harmony. Shut out either of the two contestants, and reason will tell you about the character of the result; but how is reason to decide which is to be excluded? No matter which you leave out, the resulting harmony would be equally intelligible. I see no answer except to say that when it does come to a conflict, each man must follow his own sense of approval; and I cannot see but that this is an ultimate fact of his nature, resting upon the assumption that the totality of good must not be incompatible with his ends. That good should go beyond the ends which he personally is concerned with securing, is what I have been saying. He may take an objective interest in a great many things which he is not called upon actively to further; it is just the nature of man as a rational being that he can find the world interesting even where he has no personal axe to grind. But it is not clear that he is likely to take more than a very lukewarm interest in these things except as they do indirectly contribute to the same sort of ends as those to which he is personally committed and if they actually interfere with these ends, I find myself unable to imagine him approving. Accordingly, the limit to the possibility of purely impartial and rational construction would seem to be found in the necessity for every man that harmony shall not sacrifice the particular interests which he finds his own nature demanding,interests which are set by his constitution, and which, with the feeling of satisfaction that is their only attestation, are discovered by experience rather than determined by the perception of intellectual relationships.

And this leads to a final question: What do we mean, in terms of the individual, by the rational life, or the complete life, or the unified life, or the true life,—the life of the real self? If we intend to ask, What is this in detail?, then I am led to say again that that is something which is the outcome of experience, and cannot be determined by any exercise of the intellect, though in this experience all sorts of judgments about the world and about ourselves are involved; and that, furthermore, there is no one