Page:Philosophical Review Volume 29.djvu/529

No. 6.] the fact that life is more than biology. It may be so that, keeping to the purely animal plane, 'nature' is only interested in keeping the species alive—though the statement seems more poetic than scientific. It may even be that for themselves men ought to make this their sole aim. But it is quite clear that men do not make it their comprehensive definition of living. The more ethical form in which the same general point of view has commonly issued is much more nearly adequate. This is the formula of self-realization. It may be admitted that this phrase gives an account, and a fairly true account, of the psychological situation, just as preservation perhaps does of the biological. Life is as a matter of fact the expression or realization of the self, as a center of potencies and impulses to action. But the same objection can be brought against self-realization that applies to pleasure; self-realization, no more than pleasure, is the thing at which most people are conscious of aiming. Some of them indeed do make it their aim; there are men for whom their own self-development constitutes the conscious end and motive of their lives. But this itself is enough to eliminate the term for our present purpose. Discussions about the self-realization principle have suffered from this ambiguity; the phrase is used at one time as a statement of what every act as a matter of fact is, and at another, when qualified implicitly in terms of completeness, or harmony, or all-roundness, as a specific kind of life at which some men consciously aim as the best. But as a statement of what all men do, it ceases to represent what consciously they think of themselves as doing; as a statement of what some men consciously set before themselves as an end, it is plainly not universal.

Somewhat closer to the biological formula of self-preservation is another phrase which has played a conspicuous part in recent writings. If we translate into less literal terms that assertion of oneself, in the form of superiority over one's surroundings, which self-preservation seems to imply, we might be led to think of experience as a striving after power—the consciousness of dominating the conditions of one's life. Such a mode of expression, congenial alike to a popularized theory of evolution and