Page:Philosophical Review Volume 31.djvu/277

No. 3.] hand, we would know what a given value is for us, we ask a strictly philosophical question. Its answer may require a truly cosmic insight into man and nature and destiny, an insight which human beings can only approximate. If reality as experienced is value, then our universe is throughout and distinctly personal. It is therefore social in the sense that it is a joint product. As we pass upward along the scale of values, they become social in the ordinary sense of developing inner worth as they are shared. Nature as system is secondary and instrumental, a tool, a means, a nexus of conditions, nothing more. Physical substantiality is value concreted. This conclusion carries with it also a distinctive doctrine of man and of the ultimate source of stimulation. Moreover, it gives the only raison d'etre for the evolutionary process in nature, as the place of 'soul culture,' and suggests a possible destiny for human beings that is particularly satisfying.

As a theory of value, then, philosophy makes a permanent place for itself. It definitely transcends the sciences, and can never be superseded by them. It prospers as they prosper. It becomes more distinctive and fruitful as they advance in precision and logical coherence.

This fundamental difference in aim carries with it a difference both in point of view and in method. As remarked before, the concretely real that philosophy seeks can be thought only as embodying all that the isolating, abstracting sciences reject or ignore. The most significant act of abstraction is the severance of the phenomenal object from the apprehending self. The concrete object cannot exist, of course, apart from the source and condition of its being. That this should not be taken as axiomatic, or should be held not to apply to the case in hand, is due largely to confusing the object with the source of stimulation whereby the object is made to exist for the knowing self. With this confusion eliminated, the source of stimulation must be thought of as dynamic, that is, as operating directly upon the self. All conceptions of it as static, that is, as existing passively in a non-mental space and time, are strictly unthinkable. As passive it blends indistinguishably with the non-existent. Only thought content can be static. The independent reality of the realist can