And finally the process of judgment and appraisal, of examination and revaluation. To judge for the sake of judging, to analyze and evaluate for the sake of the process hardly seems worth while. But if we supply the process with the new factors of increased life, physical, social, intelligent, we shall be compelled to new valuations. Such has been the course of moral development; we may expect this to be repeated. The great war and the changes that emerge ought to set new tasks for ethical students. As medievalism, the century of enlightenment, and the century of industrial revolution, each had its ethics, so the century that follows ought to have its ethics, roused by the problem of dealing fundamentally with economic, social, racial, and national relations, and using the resources of better scientific method than belonged to the ethical systems which served well their time.
Only wilful misinterpretation will suppose that the method here set forth is that of taking every want or desire as itself a final justification, or of making morality a matter of arbitrary caprice. But some may in all sincerity raise the question: "Is morality then after all simply the shifting mores of groups stumbling forward—or backward, or sidewise—with no fixed standards of right and good? If this is so how can we have any confidence in our present judgments, to say nothing of calling others to an account or of reasoning with them?" What we have aimed to present as a moral method is essentially this: to take into our reckoning all the factors in the situation, to take into account the other persons involved, to put ourselves into their places by sympathy as well as conceptually, to face collisions and difficulties not merely in terms of fixed concepts of what is good or fair, and what the right of each party concerned may be, but with the conviction that we need new definitions of the ideal life, and of the social order, and thus reciprocally of personality. Thus harmonized, free, and responsible, life may well find new meaning also in the older intrinsic goods of friendship, æsthetic appreciation and true belief. And it is not likely to omit the satisfaction in actively constructing new ideals and working for their fulfilment.
Frankly, if we do not accept this method what remains? Can any one by pure reason discover a single forward step in the treatment of the social situation or a single new value in the moral ideal? Can any analysis of the pure concept of right and good teach us anything? In the last analysis the moral judgment is not analytic but synthetic. The moral life is not natural but spiritual. And spirit is creative.
VALUE AND EXISTENCE IN PHILOSOPHY, ART, AND RELIGION
HORACE M. KALLEN
He who assiduously compares the profound and the commonplace will find their difference to turn merely on the manner of their expression; a profundity is a commonplace formulated in strange or otherwise obscure and unintelligible terms. This must be my excuse for beginning with the trite remark that the world we live in is not one which was made for us, but one in which we happened and grew. I am much aware that there exists a large and influential class of persons who do not think so; and I offer this remark with all deference to devotees of idealism, and to other such pietists who persist in arguing that the trouble which we do encounter in this vale of tears springs from the inwardness of our own natures and not from that of the world. I wish, indeed, that I could agree with them, but unhappily their very arguments prevent me, since, if the world were actually as they think it, they could not think it as they do. In fact, they could not think. Thinking—worse luck!—came into being as response to discomfort, to pain, to uncertainty, to problems, such as could not exist in a world truly made for us; while from time immemorial pure as distinct from human consciousness has been identified with absolute certainty, with self-absorption and self-sufficiency; as a god, a goal to attain, not a fact to rest in. It is notable that those who believe the world actually to have been made for us devote most of their thinking to explaining away the experiences which have made all men feel that the world was actually not made for us. Their chief business, after proving the world to be all good, is solving "the problem of evil." Yet, had there really been no evil, this evil consequence could not have ensued: existence would have emerged as beatitude and not as adjustment; thinking might in truth have been self-absorbed contemplation, blissful intuition, not painful learning by the method of trial and error.
Alas that what "might have been" cannot come into being by force of discursive demonstration! If it could, goodness alone would have existed and been real, and evil would have been non-existence, unreality, and appearance—all by the force of the Word. As it is, the appearance of evil is in so far forth no less an evil than its reality; in truth, it is reality and its best witnesses are the historic attempts to explain it away. For even as "appearance" it has a definite and inexpugnable character of its own which cannot be destroyed by subsumption under the "standpoint of the whole," "the absolute good," the "over-individual values." Nor, since only sticks and stones break bones and names never hurt, can it be abolished by the epithet "appearance." To deny reality to evil is to multiply the evil. It is to make two "problems" grow where only one grew before, to add to the "problem of evil" the "problem of appearance" without serving any end toward the solution of the real problem how evil can be effectively abolished.
I may then, in view of these reflections, hold myself safe in assuming that the world we live in was not made for us; that, humanly speaking, it is open to improvement in a great many directions. It will be comparatively innocuous to assume also, as a corollary, that in so far as the world was made for mind, it has been made so by man, that civilization is the adaptation of nature to human nature. And as a second corollary it may be safely assumed that the world does not stay made; civilization has brought its own problems and peculiar evils.