Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/851

No. 6.] circumstances to be encountered ; but as we are never in a position exactly to anticipate the last factor or to judge impartially of the two other factors, there is meanwhile a very real practical contingency. This contingency may be further complicated by a conflict of motives, and it is in the deliberate and rational preference of one motive to another that the idea of an end, which may be either right or wrong, becomes an ideal, which is at least believed to be right. If we grant that some particular end is indeed worthy of pursuit, there may be different degrees of fitness in various means by which we might hope to attain it, and there is therefore a secondary order of ideals, whereby the more certain and efficient means are selected.

It is clear that the function of philosophy does not end with positive knowledge or the indicative mood; though it does, as I think, begin with the quest for positive truth. Such truth includes all true statements, derived from historical sources, of what has been thought, felt, done, and enacted, in the human community; but it does not include those judgments of value which are involved in living ideals, foreshadowing a more complete and rational ordering of life. Judgments of fact about past human valuations are a very different thing from judgments of value, whereby living contemporaries agree to adopt some wisdom from the past and to promote greater wisdom in the future. Thus true philosophy always strives for a system of ideals which shall tend to unify the endless divergent interests and aspirations of humanity, as well as for a system of causal ideas whereby reality may be relatively explained, and a fundamental system of descriptive ideas, whereby the permanent aspects and perennial contents of the universe (including those of the human community and mind) may be logically apprehended. While, in the two latter respects, men reason to find the truth, in the first respect they reason to make it. But if, as this paper suggests, men can find the truth only collectively, according as groups of substantially like-minded scientific students are formed, it is still more obvious that they can make it only collectively, according as fuller agreement is attained by minds, consciously directed to the goals of the good, the beautiful, and the efficacious.