Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/49

No. 1.] how the technique of this method can be made to serve equally well such opposite theories as those of Ehrenfels and Münsterberg, the one arguing that there are no absolute values, the other laying especial stress on the contrast between eternal values and values as found in the changing mores, or in individual valuations.

Variations in these, claims the idealist, are natural and inevitable but do not affect ethical values which, like logical, aesthetic, and metaphysical values, depend on no changing or personal conditions but solely on the will to have identity in experience and thus a self-dependent world. The specific ethical value lies in identity between intention and fulfilment. Development has value not because the end is in itself better than the starting point,—for we have no right to say that it is—but because of the transition. The deed, not the result of the achievement, is valuable. This demand for a distinct world of over-individual values derives not a little of its force from the interpretation which is placed upon the individual and personal: "Every individual will is determined by pleasure and displeasure; it serves personal [private] desires and can therefore never be general and absolute." Critics of idealism have long urged that such a theory of determination by pleasure is false psychologically, and creates an abyss for the sake of bridging it by some special faculty or act. And despite the claim that this idealism differs from earlier types in beginning with experience, and not seeking a sphere beyond experience, it is still difficult to see how it can escape the consequence of excluding from the moral all content, leaving only the formal factor of identity the consequence of securing the over-personal at the expense of the human.

Croce likewise finds no gain for ethics in genetic studies; the historical is a hindrance. Yet in spite of his Kantianism he really incorporates much concrete material, and his differentiation between the economic and the ethical valuation is a suggestive one. Utilitarianism, he holds, is really good economics though not ethics. No doubt the same motives which have found expressions in all the idealisms must somehow find