For the experience, and at the time of the experience, a value is a quality of the object valued.[122] Values are "tertiary qualities" (to borrow an expression from Professor Santayana's Life of Reason[123]), just as real and objective as the "primary" and "secondary" qualities. We speak of a gloomy day, or a fearful sight, and the gloom is a quality of the day, and the fearfulness is really in the object—for the experience. When we have sufficiently reflected upon the situation to be able to separate subject and object, and to divest the object of the quality, and put the fear in ourselves, or the gloom in our own emotional life, then the experience is already past, and the value, as the value of that object, has ceased to be. We are already over our fear when we can separate it from the object. These qualities are intensive qualities, may be greater or less in degree, i.e., are quantities.[124] And they must first exist, as such quantities, before any reflective process of evaluation and comparison can put them in a scale, and make clear their relative values.[125]
So much for the experience as an immediate fact. If we break up the experience analytically, however, we of course first distinguish subject and object, and we throw the "tertiary quality," of value, over to the side of the subject. It is a phase of the subject's emotional life. In this analytical process we necessarily make abstractions,—the elements with which we finally come out, put together in a synthesis, will not give us our concrete experienced value again. But, recognizing this, we may still distinguish what seem to be the more important aspects of the value experience, on its psychological side, and set forth the criteria by which a value is to be recognized. First of all, then, value has its roots in the emotional-volitional side of mind. A pure intellect, if we may imagine it, would understand logical necessity, would contemplate the "world of description," but could know nothing of the "world of appreciation," or of values.[126] (It is precisely because intellect is never "pure," because it always has its emotional accompaniment and presuppositions, that we can objectively communicate our values, as urged in chapter viii.) But what phases of the emotional-volitional side of mind are most significant? For hedonism, an abstract element, a feeling, a pleasure or a pain, is the essence of the value,—in fact, is the value. Critics of hedonism, as Ehrenfels[127] and Professor Davenport,[128] have made desire, rather than feeling, the worth-fundamental. The psychology lying back of this conception represents a great advance over the passive, associationalistic, element psychology of the hedonists, and is especially significant as emphasizing the impulsive, dynamic nature of value, but it is still too abstract,—indeed, it abstracts from a very fundamental aspect of the value as experienced, namely, the feeling itself. Moreover, in many cases, value may be great with desire at a minimum, else we must say that value ceases when an object is possessed, and desire is satisfied. I may value my friend greatly, may be vividly conscious of that value, and yet, because he is my friend, because I already possess him, may find the element of desire a minor phase in his value, even if it be present at all.[129] Hedonism abstracts a prominent and important phase of the value experience, and while it errs in making that phase the whole of the experience, and while it has sadly misinterpreted that phase (for feelings of value cannot be reduced to pleasure and pain feelings), still we cannot afford to disregard it. Just because the hedonistic analysis is crude, it has to seize on something obvious. If we must choose between feeling and desire as the value-fundamental, we must, I think, with Meinong and Urban,[130] settle on feeling rather than desire. Our point will be, however, to protest against the identification of value with either of these, and to distinguish both of them as moments, or phases, in value, and value itself as a moment or phase in the total psychosis. Value is not to be understood apart from what Urban calls its "presuppositions."[131] Every value presupposes a going on of activity, and is intimately linked with the total psychosis,—a moving focal point of clear consciousness, with a surrounding area of vaguer processes, gradually shading off into the subconscious and unconscious at the borders. Every value is linked with the whole body of ideas, emotions, habits, instincts, impulses, which, in their organic totality, we call the personality. Back of the value stands a long history, which persists into the present in the form of dispositions and activities, of which we are unconscious so long as they are unimpeded, but which spring into consciousness at once if arrested. If the object be one that appeals to simple biological impulses, we may, as a rule, safely abstract from most of these "presuppositions," and centre attention upon the biological impulse and its accompanying feelings and ideas. But as we rise to objects that appeal to wider and higher interests, the essential presuppositions include more and more till, in vital ethical values, virtually the whole personality is essentially involved. Of these presuppositions, or "funded meaning," we need not be conscious in any detail. The value, which is the emotional-volitional aspect of this funded meaning, is, of course, sufficient, so long as it is unchallenged by an opposing value, for the motivation of our activity—which is the essential function of values. The presuppositions tend to become explicit when the value is challenged by another value, though they never come entirely into light, in the case of the higher values, and to make them even approximately clear is the work of long conflict in an introspective mind. A frequent result of conflicts among values is a sort of mechanical "haul and strain," producing "more heat than light." The question of the relations among values is a separate topic, which will be discussed for its own sake later. We are here interested in it as making clearer the nature of the "presuppositions" of value.
Now in the value, as has been said, we may distinguish both desire and feeling. The feelings, in Professor Dewey's phrase, are "absolutely pluralistic" and cannot be reduced to any one type, or two types, as pleasure and pain. The desires may be either intense or slight, without reference to the amount of the value, depending on circumstances. As stated, if we have the object we value, the element of desire must be reduced to an attitude, to a disposition to desire, in the event the object should be lost. It remains a vague background of concern, of "anxiety lest the object escape," capable, of course, of springing into full intensity if need be. In æsthetic values, and in the values of mystical repose, we have cases where desire is,[132] thus, at a minimum. Strictly speaking, desire, as a conscious fact, has in it always a negative aspect, a privative aspect,—we desire when we are incomplete, when we lack. It is this negative aspect of desire which the Greek philosophers, as Aristotle, stressed, and which has led absolute idealism to eliminate desire from its conception of the Absolute Spirit. But desire has also a positive or active aspect, and in this aspect it remains in all values. Where the activity is perfectly unified,—a situation which we sometimes approximate,—we may not be conscious of desire, even though intense activity is going on. Since, however, the human mind is rarely in this state, and never completely in it, we may hold that desire, in its privative aspect, is always to some degree present, if only as a vague uneasiness. And as a disposition to activity, if the value should be threatened, desire is always present.
Conversely, desire may be at a maximum, and feeling at a minimum. If we do not possess the object, if we are striving for it, while there may be and doubtless is feeling in connection with the desire, it cannot, obviously, be the same feeling that we would experience if the object were present and quenching the desire. Indeed, it may be held that much of the feeling-accompaniment of intense desire is extraneous to the value-moment: that it is, in fact, kinæsthetic feeling, due to the stress of opposing muscular reactions, etc. The disposition to feel is there, and, if the object of desire be one that is familiar, the mere anticipation of it may call up traces of the feeling that its presence has in the past produced and will produce again. But the feeling element in such a situation is a minor phase.
Finally, unless we mean to insist that all the objects which one values, and whose values motivate one's conduct, are present in consciousness all the time, we must recognize that neither desire nor feeling need be actual, present, conscious facts, for the value to be effective. It may happen that the object of value is one reserved for later use, and that it is not threatened. In such a case we may accord its value intellectual recognition, with desire and feeling both at a minimum, and that recognition may serve as a term in a logical process which may lead to a practical conclusion of significance for action. Or, a value may form part of the unconscious "presupposition" of another value, which is consciously felt at the moment. Mind is economical. Consciousness is not wasted, when there is no function to be served by it. The essential thing about value is that it motivate our conduct. If a satisfactory set of habits be built up about a value, it may serve this purpose perfectly, without coming into consciousness very often. But both desire and feeling must be potentially there.
A further element is necessary. Meinong insists upon an existential judgment, a judgment that the object valued is real, as essential to value.[133] Gabriel Tarde[134] makes a similar contention, holding that belief, as well as desire, is involved in value, and that a diminution of either means a lessening of the value. Urban's opinion, which seems to me the correct one, is that we need not and cannot go so far as this.[135] In many cases such judgments are explicit and the value could not exist if the object were explicitly judged unreal. But the mere unconscious assumption or presumption of the reality of the object, the mere "reality-feeling," is sufficient,—as is obvious enough from the fact that we value the objects of our imagination. We shall often find, especially in the field of the social values to which we shall shortly turn, that Tarde's contention is highly significant, particularly with reference to economic values, and there, particularly in the matter of credit phenomena.[136] But explicit affirmation, even there, is not necessary, provided the question of reality is not raised at all. A "reality-feeling," however, is essential. It should be noticed, too, that this "reality-feeling" is an essentially emotional, rather than intellectual, fact. It is the emotional "tang" which distinguishes belief from mere ideation, and, if it be present, the ideation and explicit judgment may be dispensed with.
In the value experience, as a conscious experience, and from the structural side, we may distinguish these phases: feeling, desire, and the reality-feeling, each present at least to a minimal degree. And yet it seems to me that we have in none of these, considered as phases in consciousness, the most essential aspect of value. For our purposes the structural aspect is not the most significant. The functional aspect is of more importance. And the function of values is the function of motivation. That value is greatest which counts for most in motivating activity. A well-established and unquestioned value, which in a concrete situation has the pas over all the others concerned, has little need to awaken the emotional intensity that other, less certain, values, whose position in the scale is as yet undetermined, may require. A girl is arranging a dinner-party. Whom shall she invite? Well, her chum of course must be there. No question arises. There is no need for conscious emotion. One or two others are settled upon almost as readily, and with as little emotional intensity. But now comes the problem at the margin! For eight or ten others are almost equally desirable, and there are only six places. The lower values, compared with each other, must show themselves for what they are, must come vividly into consciousness, must be felt and desired in order that they may be compared,—not in order that they may be! From the functional side, then, the test of a value is its influence upon activity. The "common denominator," or, better, the abstract essence, of values, is, not feeling, nor desire, but power in motivation, and the expression of this is of course the activity itself. The functional significance of the consciously realized desire and feeling aspects of values comes in when values are to be compared and weighed against one another, and—a phase that was stressed in a preceding section, and will again be adverted to shortly—when values are to be shared consciously by different individuals, when they are to be communicated and discussed,—that is to say, are to become objects of a group consciousness.
The significant thing about value, then, from this functional point of view is its dynamic quality. Value is a force, a motivating force. But now we must revert to our original point of view,—the total situation. We have, by an analytical process, sundered subject and object, and then, within the subject, have discriminated phases which psychological analysis reveals. But in the course of activity, these elements are not discriminated. The value is, not in the subject, but in the object. The object is an embodiment of the force. It has power over us, over our actions. If the object be a person, we are under his control—to the extent of the value. If the object be a thing controlled by another person, we are subject to his control—to the extent of the value. I do not wish to be understood as picking out this abstract phase of value as the whole of the story, or thinking that it is possible for value to exist in this abstract form. Qualities are never separate. But I do contend that this is the essential and universal element in values, and that for an individual engaged in the active conduct of life, this aspect is so significant that it may often be the sole feature to engage his attention—because it is the sole feature that need engage his attention for the activity to go on in harmony with his values. Here, then, is value "stripped for racing": a quantity of motivating force, power over the actions of a man, embodied in an object. All the other phases, in the course of the active experience itself, may be relegated to the sphere of the implicit.
A necessary limitation has been definitely indicated in what has gone before, but, to avoid misunderstanding, it may be well to indicate it more explicitly. Not every form of impulse is to be counted a value. Every state of consciousness is motor, and tends to pass into action, even vague, undefined feelings, and half-conscious fancies. A value must have its organic presuppositions, as indicated before, and must be embodied in an object. The objects of value may be infinitely various: they may be economic goods, they may be persons, they may be activities, they may be other values, they may be ideal objects, the creatures of our imaginations, they may be social utopias or the Kingdom of Heaven. But there must be an object, and the value is a quality of the object. But, functionally, the essential thing about this value is its dynamic character.