Page:Philosophical Review Volume 5.djvu/102

86 in the unconditioned. Man receives the moral law from himself alone. He is an end in himself, and lives in a community of free personalities. At this point two questions arise: (1) What does the ethical view of Idealism do for the understanding of human life? (2) What kind of a moral-shaping energy does it bear? Idealism enjoins upon us the unity of all the phenomena of human life. The idea of personality becomes for human life the same that the law of nature is for the phenomena of nature, viz., that which we presuppose in order to explain the phenomena. And as we presuppose personality to explain the individual life, so we posit humanity as ultimate end to explain the life of the race. Moral action is a simple self-intelligible requirement of personality. A hedonistic theory does not lead to the understanding of human existence, and it contains no specific moral energy. Further, Idealism has shown that moral judgments are essentially different from judgments of cognition. The latter concern facts only. "But when we judge acts, men, and circumstances morally, our judgment contains already the projection of the ideal which we hold as the task for men." Finally, Idealism teaches us to understand art as a phenomenon of freedom. For the real artist, art is not the beautiful, but the self-intelligible.

In view of the growing importance of the conception of Value for the sciences of ethics, economics, and education, this paper calls attention to the recent examinations of the subject by the two Austrian writers, Alexius Meinong and Christian Ehrenfels, both of whom have been influenced by the work of Brentano and the Austrian economists. The views of Ehrenfels were expressed in five articles in the Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie (1893-1894), under the title, Werththeorie und Ethik. In these articles the points of chief interest are: (1) the distinctions between Intrinsic and Instrumental Values (Eigenwerthe and Wirkungswerthe), and between Utility and Value (Nutzen and Frommen); (2) the discussion of the relation of Value to feeling and desire; (3) a treatment of the relation of feeling and desire; (4) a consideration of the possibility of error in attaching Value to objects; (5) a discussion of negative Values. The interest of the work is mainly psychological, and although it is "a singularly original, subtle, and