Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/685

No. 5.] have been made, and ultimately justified, though for the time being they were not recognized as contributory to the common good and were, on the contrary, subversive of the institutions in which the common good was then objectified. Galileo's right to conduct and publish investigations which were destined to shatter the moral and religious structure of Roman Christianity can hardly be defended on the ground that he was finding a station in the social order that was still dominant in Italy in the early seventeenth century, though looking at the matter from a much later date we should probably agree that Galileo was contributing to the common good. The point is that the common good is something quite different before and after the appearance of a man who can open up unsuspected possibilities of accomplishment. The common good is no more ultimate than individual good; discovery may change both.

The over-emphasis just pointed out is one which is natural if not inevitable to an absolute logic, which looks with condescention upon mere differences of time and space. The ultimate justification of the individual must be in terms of the common good, when it has been made clear what the common good is. But the process of clarification is supposed to be only a process of making explicit something that was already there. The common good really demanded the individual's contribution, though the system then enthroned was in fact hostile to the effort to contribute in that way. In a word, the interpretation after the fact is read back into the fact itself. The station is regarded as there waiting to be filled, because after it is filled it becomes a station. But this way of looking at the matter quite glosses over and conceals the most intensely individual aspect of the whole situation, the struggle to make a station in a partly hostile system, to secure for a value the recognition which it can not be accorded so long as existing values remain unchallenged. This loyalty to a social station which does not exist, but which might and ought to exist, is an aspect of all true individuality which cannot be obscured without falsifying the concept of individuality itself. Nor is it fair to insist that "the complex of social institutions is ... very much more complete than the explicit ideas which at