[29] It must, however, be understood that the formula in which a finality is expressed is not itself a final formula. The business of definition is precarious, liable to error and dogmatic abuse, and the formulas of finality are to be constantly subjected to revision. Possible and even probable abuse, however, does not warrant the negative attitude at present taken; it does not justify the revulsion of feeling against A Priorism which is just now general. Exasperation with absolutism does not of itself justify recourse to the opposite extreme of pragmatism.
[30] Say not part or element, but member, to distinguish the components of the ethical manifold from such concepts as are used in mathematics and physical science.
[31] The distinction between value and worth must be stressed for it is capital. Value is subjective. The worth notion is the most objective conceivable. Value depends on the wants or needs of our empirical nature. That has value which satisfies our needs or wants. We possess value for one another, for the reason that each of us has wants which the others alone are capable of satisfying, as in the case of sex, of coöperation, in the vocation, etc. But value ceases when the want or need is gratified. The value which one human being has for another is transient. There are, in the strict sense, no permanent values. The value which the majority have for the more advanced and developed members of a community is small; from the standpoint of value most persons are duplicable and dispensable. Consider only the ease with which factory labor is replaced, in consequence of the prolific fertility of the human race. The custom of speaking of ethics as a theory of values is regrettable. It evidences the despair into which many writers on ethics have fallen as to the possibility of discovering an objective basis for rightness.
[32] But the verification itself is the clearer and more explicit vision of the ethical relation, as it ought to be.
[33] The term “ethical unit” used above should be found useful. The chemists have found the concept of the atom useful, though no one has ever seen an atom. And all the sciences have recourse to similar inventions,—such as the electron, or the ion, or energy regarded as a substance, and in mathematics the sublimated, space-transcending concepts. Looking through the eyes of science, we are taught to see, underlying the grossest forms of matter, imaginary entities which are well-nigh metaphysical in nature. Science starts from the realm of the sensible, and constructs its super-rarefied devices on mechanical models. Then it leaves the field of the intuitively perceptible, and rises by the path of analogy into realms where the notions with which it operates are no longer imaginable. I do not wish, in speaking of an ethical, invisible, and unimaginable entity, to derive the postulation of this conception from science. The ethical concept transcends wholly the field of sensible experience. It is not discovered by way of analogy. It is frankly and overtly supersensible. It is not exemplified in the effects it produces in the world of volition as the most nearly metaphysical concepts of science are exemplified in the field of phenomena by the recurrences or uniformities which they serve to account for. The ethical concepts are not verified by their results at all, not by recurrences of phenomena, but by the persistence of the effort to attain that which is finitely never attained, and by the more explicit perception of the ideal itself which follows the persistent effort; for as has been shown above, when face to face with fundamental truth, seeing is believing. But I allude to these matters in order to show that the movement in ethical thinking represented by the system which I propose is not contrary to the present-day movement in science, but in line with it, though beyond it. It does not ask leave of science; it does not base its certainty on scientific precedent; but neither does it expect a veto from the lips of science. The worthwhileness of scientific endeavor itself depends at bottom on the sanction which the ideal of the complete carrying out of the reality-producing functions lends to their incomplete execution in the world of the space and time manifold.
[34] I do not however agree with those who regard the shreds of theology remaining in his system as a concession, not wholly ingenuous, to orthodoxy. He was brought up in the pietistic faith, and had probably not entirely outgrown the emotional impressions of those early teachings. The noumena, however, play a part in the system itself distinct from the theology, and are not to be taken as supersensible realities. They are limiting concepts intended to serve as incentives or lures, winning the mind to continue without cessation its advance along certain paths within the field of experience; but they are not supposed to give any clue as to what is beyond experience. That which is beyond the field of experience is simply unknowable. Thus the noumenon called “thing per se” is notice given to the mind not to be deterred in its proper business of unifying the space and time manifold by the difficulties which arise when the time and space manifold is taken as an ultimate account of reality. The thing per se is a welcome to science and not a bar set up in its path.
The noumenon of freedom is an incentive to man urging him to act as if he were capable of practicing the law of universality and necessity. In fact the phrase “as if” plays a leading rôle in the Kantian philosophy. The noumenon of God, as will presently be shown, is afflicted with this conditional “as if” character to even a higher degree. We are to assume God in order to look upon the vast field of possible experience as if it were unified, as if a being who himself stands for unity had been its creator. This assumption is supposed to be necessary in order to encourage the scientist in his search for the thread of unity, lest he flag by the way. As a matter of fact scientists have contented themselves with the simple assumption of the uniformity of nature as necessary to the prosecution of their investigations, and have as a rule troubled themselves little to hypostasize the notion of unity. Nor has recent progress in science been associated with and influenced by the belief in an individual Deity. The noumenon of God is unnecessary for science while in Kant’s ethical application of it it is positively harmful. He introduces the God notion as an artificial device for linking together happiness and virtue, a device quite inconsistent with the noble austerity of his ethical system, whatever its other defects may be.
The noumena, then, are apparitions that appear at the end of certain paths in the field of experience, far off where the sky and the ground seem to meet. These paths run off in different directions. At the end of each is one of these limiting apparitions, and the society of noumena is disconnected internally: there is no relation of unity between the unifiers.
[35] The difference between “supersensible” and “supernatural” is capital. I do not encourage relapse into supernaturalism. The supernatural is the opposite of the supersensible. It is an attempt to represent in natural or sensible guise what is supposed to be beyond the senses; and the naturalistic representation of the supersensible is then taken not metaphorically but literally.
[36] He allows indeed the Ens Realissimum to remain, and calls it the ideal of the reason, the ideal of unity hypostasized, centralized in an individual, and somehow harboring within itself all real properties whatsoever. But it is quite impossible to conceive how all real properties can belong to a single individual. For the properties as we know them are incompatible with each other. Surely an individual cannot be both great and small, beautiful and ugly, of all colors and sounds, etc., etc. Or again if all properties were somehow assembled in one individual, since that individual is conceived of as an hypostasized unity, it would be impossible to speak of a relation between them, and yet upon the relation of the differentiæ depends the ethical utility of the idea of a supreme reality.