It has been taken for granted throughout that there are but two forms of valuation-process, the ethical and the economic. The reason for this limitation may already be sufficiently apparent, but it will further illustrate our general conception of the valuation-process briefly to indicate it in detail. What shall be said, for example, of the common use of the term "value" in such expressions as the "value of life," the "emotional value" of an object or a moral act, the "natural value" of a type of impulsive activity? In these uses of the word the reference is apparently to one's own incommunicable inner experience of living, of perception of the object, or of the impulse, which cannot be suggested to any other person who has not himself had the experience. My pleasure, my color-sensation in its affective aspect, my emotion, are inner and subjective, and I distinguish them by such expressions as the above from the visible, tangible object to which I ascribe them as constituting its immediate or natural value to me. This broader use of the term "value" has not found recognition in the foregoing pages, and it requires here a word of comment. So long as these phases of the experience of the object are not recognized as separable in thought from the object viewed as an external condition or means, they would apparently be better characterized in some other way. If, however, they are so recognized, and are thereby taken as determinative of the agent's practical attitude toward the thing, we have merely our typical situation of ethical valuation of some implied purpose as conducive to the self and economic valuation of the means as requisites for execution of the purpose. Our general criterion for the propriety of terming any mode of consciousness the value of an object must be that it shall perform a logical function and not simply be referred to in its aspect of psychical fact. The feeling or emotion, or whatever the mode of consciousness in question may be, must play the recognized part, in the agent's survey of the situation, of prompting and supporting a definite practical attitude with reference to the object. If, in short, the experience in question enters in any way into a conscious purpose of the agent, it may properly be termed a value.[163]
Æsthetic value also has not been recognized, and for the opposite reason. The sense of beauty would appear to be a correlate of relatively perfect attained adjustment between the agent and his natural environment or the conditions suggested more or less impressively by the work of art. There must, indeed, be present in the æsthetic experience an element of unsatisfied curiosity sufficient to stimulate an interest in the changing or diverse aspects of the beautiful object, but this must not be sufficient to prompt reflective judgment of the details presented. On the whole, the æsthetic experience would appear to be essentially post-judgmental and appreciative. It comes on the particular occasion, not as the result of a judgment-process of the valuational type, but as an immediate appreciation. As an immediate appreciation it has no logical function and on our principles must be denied the name of value. Our standpoint must be that of the experiencing individual. The æsthetic experience as a type may well be a development out of the artistic and so find its ultimate explanation in the psychology of man's primitive technological occupations in the ordinary course of life. It is, as we have said, of the post-judgmental type, and so may very probably be but the cumulative outcome of closer and closer approximations along certain lines to a perfected adjustment with the conditions of life. It may thus have its origin in past processes of the reflective valuational type. Nevertheless, viewed in the light of its actual present character and status in experience, the æsthetic must be excluded from the sphere of values.
Thus the realms of fact and value are both real, but that of value is logically prior and so the "more real." The realm of fact is that of conditions warranting the purposes of the self; as a separate order, complete and absolute in itself, it is an abstraction that has forgotten the reason for which it was made. Reality in the logical sense is that which furthers the development of the self. The purpose that falls short of its promise in this regard is unreal—not, indeed, in the psychological sense that it never existed in imagination, but in the logical sense that it is no longer valued. Within the inclusive realm of reality the realm of fact is that of the means which serve the concrete purposes which the self accepts. The completed purpose, however, is not means, since still behind and beyond it there can be no other concrete valued purpose which it can serve. Nor is it an ultimate end, since in its character of accepted and valued end the self adheres to it, and it therefore cannot express the whole purpose of the self to whose unspecifiable fulness and increase of activity it is but a temporary probational contributor. It is rather in the nature of a formula or method of behavior to which the self ascribes reality by recognizing and accepting it as its own.
XI
SOME LOGICAL ASPECTS OF PURPOSE
INTRODUCTORY
Whenever and wherever it was discovered that the content of experience as given in immediate perception could be reconstructed through ideas, then and there began to emerge such questions as these: What is the significance of this reconstructive power? What is the relation between it and the immediate experience? What is the relative value of each in experience as a whole? What is their relation to truth and error? If thinking leads to truth, and thought must yet get its material from perception, how then shall the product of thought escape infection from the material? On the other hand, if truth is to be found in the immediate experience, can it here be preserved from the blighting effects of thought? For so insistent and pervasive is this activity of thought that it appears to penetrate into the sanctum of perception itself. Turning to a third possibility, if it should be found that truth and error are concerned with both—that they are products of the combined activity of perception and reflection—then just what does each do? And what in their operations marks the difference between truth and error? Or still again, if truth and error cannot be found in the operations of perception and reflection as such, then they must be located in the relation of these processes to something else. If so, what is this something else? Out of such questions as these is logic born.
There may be those who will object to some of these questions as "logical" problems—those who would limit logic to a description of the forms and processes of reconstruction, relegating the question of the criterion of truth and error to "epistemology." This objection we must here dismiss summarily by saying that, by whatever name it is called, a treatment of the forms and processes of thought must deal with the criterion of truth and error, since these different "forms" are just those which thought assumes in attempting to reach truth under different conditions.