There are three typical cases in which economic judgment or valuation of the means is necessary, and the enumeration of these will make clear the relation between the ethical and the economic types of judgment: (1) First may be mentioned the case in which ethical deliberation has apparently reached its end in the formation of a plan of action which, so far as one can see, on ethical grounds is unobjectionable. A definite "temptation" may have been overcome, or out of a more complex situation a satisfactory ethical compromise or readjustment may have been developed with much difficulty. Now, there are very often cases in which such a course of action still may not be entered on without further hesitation; for, if the plan be one requiring for its working out the use of material means, the fact of an existing limitation of one's supply of means must bring hitherto unthought of ends into conflict with it. There are doubtless many situations in which one's moral choice may be carried into practice without consideration of ways and means, as when one forgives an injury or holds his instinctive nature under discipline in the effort to attain an ascetic or a genuinely social ideal of character. But more often than the moral rigorist cares to see, questions of an economic nature must be raised after the ethical "evidence is all in"—questions which are probably more trying to a sensitive moral nature than those more dramatic situations in which the real perils of self-sophistication are vastly less, and the simpler, sharper definition of the issue makes possible a less difficult, though a more decisive and edifying, victory. (2) In the second place are those cases in which the end that has emerged is without conspicuous moral quality, because, although it may represent some worthy impulse, it has not been obliged to make its way to acceptance against the resistance of desires less worthy than itself. This is the ideal case of economic theory in which "moral distinctions are irrelevant," and the economic man is free, according to the myth, to perform his hedonistic calculations without thought of moral scruple. The end ethically acceptable in itself, like the enriching of one's library, must, when the means are limited, divert a portion of the means from other uses, and will thus, through reference to the indispensable means, engage in conflict with other ends quite remotely, if in the agent's knowledge at all, related with itself. (3) Finally we reach the limit of apparent freedom from ethical considerations in the operations of business institutions, and perhaps especially in those of large business corporations. Apart from the routine operations of a business which involve no present exercise of the valuing judgment, there are constantly in such institutions new projects which must be considered, and which commonly must involve revaluation of the means. In this revaluation the principle of greatest revenue is supposed to be the sole criterion, regardless of other personal or social points of view from which confessedly the measure might be considered. But such a supposition, however true to the facts of current business practice it may be, we must hold to be an abstraction when viewed from the standpoint of the social life at large, and hence no real exception to our general principle. The economic and the ethical situations differ, as types, only in the closeness of relation between the ends that are in conflict and in the manner in which the ends are first brought into conflict—not in respect of the intrinsic nature of the ends which are involved in them.[112] It is this difference which, as we shall see, explains why ethical valuation must be of ends, and economic valuation, on the other hand, of means.
We have yet to see in what way valuation of the means of action can serve to resolve a difficulty of the type which has thus been designated as Economic. The question must be deferred until a more detailed analysis of the economic judgment-process can be undertaken. It is enough for our present purpose to note that the subject of valuation in this process is the means, and to see that under the typical conditions which have been described some further determination of the means than the merely physical one of their factual availability for the competing ends is needed.[113] Physically and mechanically the means are available for each one of the ends or groups of ends in question; the pressing problem is to determine for which one of the ends, if any, or to what compromise or readjustment of certain of the ends or all of them, the means at hand are in an economic sense most properly available.[114]
From this preliminary discussion of the ethical and economic situations we must now pass to discuss the objectivity of the judgments by which the agent meets the difficulties which such situations as these present. We shall seek to show that these judgments are constructive of an objective order of reality. It will be necessary in the first place to determine the psychological conditions of the more commonly recognized experience of Objectivity in the restricted sphere of sense-perception. There might otherwise remain a certain antecedent presumption against the thesis which we wish to establish even after the direct argument had been presented.[115]
III
Common-sense and natural science certainly tend to identify the objectively real with the existent in space and time. The physical universe is held to be palpably real in a way in which nothing not presented in sensuous terms can be. To most minds doubtless it is difficult to understand why Plato should have ascribed to the Ideas a higher degree of reality than that possessed by the particular objects of sense-perception, and still more difficult to understand his ascription of real existence to such Ideas as those of Beauty, Justice, and the Good. There is a certain apparent stability in a universe presented in "immediate" sense-perception—a universe with which we are in constant bodily intercourse—that seems not to belong to a mere order of relations which, if known in any sense, is not known to us through the senses. Moreover, knowledge of the physical world is felt to possess a higher degree of certainty than does any knowledge we can have of supposed economic or moral truth, or of economic or moral standards. Of such knowledge one is disposed to say, as Mr. Spencer does of metaphysics, that at the best it presupposes a long and elaborate inferential process which, as long, is likely to be faulty; whereas physical truth is immediate or else, when inference is involved in it, easy to be tested by appeal to immediate facts. Physical reality is a reality that can be seen and handled and felt as offering resistance, and this is evidence of objectivity of a sort not to be found in other spheres of knowledge for which the like claim is made.
The force of these impressions (and it would not be difficult to find stronger statements in the history of scientific and ethical nominalism) diminishes if one tries to determine in what consists that objectivity which they uncritically assume as given in sense-perception. For one must recognize that not all our possible modes of sense-experience are equally concerned in the presentation of this perceived objective world. Certain sensory "quales" are immediately referred to outward objects as belonging to them. Certain others are, in a way, "inward," either not more definitely localized at all or merely localized in the sense-organ which mediates them. Now, the reason for this difference cannot lie in the content of the various sense-qualities abstractly taken. A visual sensation, apart from the setting in which it occurs in common experience, can be no more objective in its reference—indeed, can have no more reference of any kind—than the least definite and instructive organic sensation. For the degree of distinctness with which one discriminates sense-qualities depends upon the number and importance of the interpretative associations which it is important from time to time to "connect" with them; or, conversely, the sense-qualities are not self-discriminating in virtue of an intrinsic objective reference or meaning which each possesses and which drives it apart from all the rest. Indeed, an intrinsic meaning, if a sensation could possess one, would not only be superfluous in the development of knowledge, but, as likely to be mistaken for the acquired or functional meaning, even seriously confusing.[116]
Now, it must be granted that, if the "simple idea of sensation" is without objective reference, no association with it of similarly abstract sensations can supply the lack. A "movement" sensation, or a tactual, having in itself no such meaning, cannot merely by being "associated" with a similarly meaningless visual sensation endow this latter with reference to an object. Objective reference is, in fact, not a sensuous thing; it is not a conscious "element," nor does it arise from any combination or fusion of such. It is neither in the association of ideas as a constituent member, nor does it belong to the association considered as a sequence of psychical states. Instead, in our present view, it belongs to or arises out of the activity through which and with reference to which associations are first of all established. It is an aspect or kind of reference or category under which any sense-quality or datum is apperceived when it is held apart from the stream of consciousness in order that it may receive new meaning as a stimulus; and a sensation functioning in such a "state of consciousness"[117] is a psychical phenomenon very different from the conscious element of "analytical" psychology. The extent to which it is true that the objective world of sense-perception is pre-eminently visual and tactual is then merely an evidence of the extent to which the exigencies of the life-process have required finer sense-discrimination for the sake of more refined reaction within these spheres as compared with others. Our conclusion, then, must be that the consciousness of objectivity is not as such sensuous, even as given in our perception of the material world. The world, as viewed from the standpoint of a particular, practical emergency, is an objective world, not in virtue of its having a "sensuous" or a "material" aspect as something existent per se, but because it is a world of stimuli in course of definition for the guidance of activity.[118]
It will be well to give further positive exposition of the meaning of the view thus stated. To return once more to our fundamental psychological conception, knowledge is essentially relevant to the solution of particular problems of more or less urgency and of various kinds and figures in the solution of such problems as the assemblage of consciously recognized symbols or stimuli by which various actions are suggested. The object as known is therefore not the same as the object as apprehended in other possible modes of being conscious of it. The workman who is actually using his tool in shaping his material, or the warrior who is actually using his weapon in the thick of combat, is, if conscious of these objects at all (and doubtless he may be conscious of them at such times), not conscious of them as objects—as the one might be, for example, in adjusting the tool for a particular kind of use, and the other in giving a keen edge to his blade. Under these latter circumstances the tool or weapon is an object, and its observed condition, viewed in the light of a purpose of using the object in a certain way, is regarded as properly suggesting certain changes or improvements. And likewise will the tool or the weapon have an objective character in the agent's apprehension in the moment of identifying and selecting it from among a number of others, or even in the act of reaching for it, especially if it is inconveniently placed. But in the act of freely using one's objective means the category of the objective plays no part in consciousness, because at such times there is no judgment respecting the means—because there is no sufficient occasion for the isolation of certain conscious elements from the rest of the stream of conscious experience to be defined as stimuli to certain needed responses. Such isolation will not normally take place so long as the reactions suggested by the conscious contents involved in the experience are fully adequate to the situation. Objects are not normally held apart as such from the stream of consciousness in which they are presented and recognized as possessing qualities warranting certain modes of conduct, excepting as it has become necessary to the attainment of the agent's purposes to modify or reconstruct his activity.[119]
Are things, then, apprehended as objective in virtue of the agent's attitude toward them, or is the agent's attitude in a typical case grounded upon an antecedent determination of the objectivity of the things in question? We must answer, in the first place, that there can be no such antecedent determination. We may, it is true, speak of believing, on the evidence of sight or touch, that a certain object is really present before us. But neither sight nor touch possesses in itself, as a particular sense-quality, any objective meaning. If touch is par excellence the sense of the objective and the appeal to touch the test of objectivity, this can only be because touch is the sense most closely and intimately connected in our experience with action. After any interval of hesitation and judgment, action begins with contact with and manipulation of the physical means which have been under investigation. Not only is touch the proximate stimulus and guide to manipulation, but all relevant knowledge which has been gained in any judgment-process, through the other senses, and especially through sight, must ultimately be reducible to terms of touch or other contact sense. The alleged tactual evidence of objectivity is, then, rather a confirmation than a difficulty for our present view. In short, we must dismiss as impossible the hypothesis that there can be a consciousness of objectivity which is not dependent upon and an expression of primary antecedent tendencies toward motor response to the presented stimulus. It is our attitude toward the prospective stimulus that mediates the consciousness of an object standing over against us.
So far, indeed, is it from being true that objectivity is a matter for special determination antecedently to action that by common testimony the conviction of objectivity comes to us quite irresistibly. The object forces itself upon us, as we say, and "whether we will or no" we must recognize its presence there before us and its independence of any choice of ours or of our knowledge. In the cautious manipulation of an instrument, in the laborious shaping of some refractory material, in the performance of any delicate or difficult task, one's sense of the objectivity of the thing with which one works is as obtrusive as remorse or grief, and as little to be shaken off. We shall revert to this suggested analogy at a later stage in our discussion.