Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/400

386 of the angel. To the angel, as to Mr. Alexander, the question as to the worth of life would have no meaning. The angel is, in Nietzsche's phrase, "jenseits von Gut und Böse."

It is hardly necessary to call attention to the fact that the value of any experience or act is not measured simply by the sensibility mode which accompanies it, or by that which immediately succeeds it, or by both together; but by the total report of such experience, or act, in the affective states of all sentient beings reached by it. Somewhere or other, all experiences and all acts must find their evaluation in an inner world of enjoyment and satisfaction, which is psychologically expressible in terms of feeling. The view for which I am contending has suffered greatly from the vulgar error of identifying sensibility with sensuous feelings. Thus 'reason' and 'sensibility' are often contrasted, and reason represented as 'regulative' of sensibility. While this mode of statement contains an element of truth, it tends to obscure the fact that reason is also 'constitutive' of sensibility, i.e., that accompanying the cognitive or ideational processes are modes of sensibility which are made possible only by those processes. It cannot, therefore, be too insistently urged, especially from the standpoint of ethics, that the affective states are only partly, and often only to a slight degree, determined by the sensations referrible to the special senses and to the organic processes, but that for human beings those feelings which accompany the ideational processes, and whose source is 'central' or 'cerebral,' are by far the more weighty and significant. Sensibility is the affective side of the total self, and thought in its loftiest flights plays its part in it as truly as do the senses. Indeed, for civilized man, thought plays the chief rôle. It was a commonplace even of Epicurean ethics that memory and imagination were far more significant for happiness than was sensation. The persistent disregard of the higher feelings, and the unfair interpretation of hedonistic theories which has resulted, are sufficient excuse for dwelling upon the subject. Although the point of view of the