Social Value Part 7

[114] _Ibid._, p. 9.

[115] Compare Professor Giddings' more detailed and concrete treatment of the subject in his _Readings in Descriptive and Historical Sociology_, New York, 1906, pp. 124-428.

[116] Professor C. A. Elwood, in the essay mentioned _supra_, _Some Prolegomena to Social Psychology_, is the first, so far as I know, to apply Professor Dewey's psychological viewpoint to the study of the social mind.

Chap. II of his book contains a very excellent brief discussion of this point. Without going into the matter at length, it must suffice to say here that the new viewpoint stresses the significance of mental processes for _activity_, for the adjustment of the organism to its environment, rather than the _structure_ or _content_ of the mental process. It stresses impulse, instinct, habit, etc., and refuses to undertake a synthetic process, which strives to get some sort of mechanical unity by combining abstract, structural elements. The unifying principle in mind is _activity_, _function_. Professor Elwood holds that, while the individual mind has unity both of structure and of function, the social mind has a unity of function only. I think the contrast is not so sharp as that. There is _some_ structural unity in the social mind, there are points of ident.i.ty among individual minds, common ideals, and a common--even though small--body of knowledge, especially in very elementary matters. And the unity of the individual mind is primarily a unity of _function_.

Certainly--and there is no issue with Professor Elwood here!--there is no unifying "soul-substance" lying back of the psychic activities organized in the single individual mind. And the a.n.a.logy between the mind of an individual and the mind of society is not intended to read into the social mind any of the hypothetical character which an absolutistic, preevolutionary metaphysics ascribed to the individual mind, but rather--in so far as the issue is raised at all--to divest the individual mind of just that hypothetical character. _Cf._ Friedrich Paulsen's _Introduction to Philosophy_, on "soul-substance," and Wundt's _Volker-Psychologie_, vol. I, chap. I.

[117] Davenport, _op. cit._, pp. 467-68.

[118] _Op. cit._, pp. 445-46. (The reference is given to Professor Davenport's book for the convenience of the reader. The original article appears in the _Journal of Political Economy_ for March, 1906.) "Some linguistic uses connected with collective nouns will offer a point of departure. When thought of merely as indicating an aggregate, a unit, the collective noun takes a singular verb; if regarded as a collection of units, it takes the plural verb....

"Now, in many cases, though the act or the situation a.s.serted is really one of each individual by himself, there is no occasion for insisting upon this; no ambiguity or inaccuracy or misapprehension is involved in saying that 'the battalion is eating its dinner'; it is a shorthand fashion of speech, but it is perfectly intelligible; it is common enough to think of a battalion as a unit, and the act of dining is a simple one in which all join, and in which all comport themselves in pretty much the same way; from the point of view adopted, the interest proceeded upon, the purpose in hand, no importance attaches to the fundamental separateness of the activities, and to their entire lack either of psychical unity or of purposive cooperation; they are simply similar--roughly simultaneous--and are thought of in block. True, one man eats rapidly and another slowly, some little and others much, and a few sick ones not at all; but the expression serves, and implies its own limitations of accuracy.... But when it comes to a.s.serting that the army is brushing its teeth, or has stubbed its toe, or has a stomach ache, there is obvious difficulty. These things are not done jointly, cooperatively, by aggregates, and will not bear thinking over into this form.

"And so we may speak of public opinion, the preference, or habit, or custom, or convention, of society; and no harm need come of it, despite the fact that some men neither think nor choose in the manner implied, but have their own peculiar judgments or choices or wishes, and yet are members of society, ent.i.tled to be included in any exact formulation; every one knows that the thought really runs upon majorities of "most everybodies'; that is, no harm need come of it, if only there were not people to take the notion of a 'social mind' seriously, and to import into cases calling for accurate a.n.a.lysis, and to accept as sober fact, a mere figure of speech, or at best a loose a.n.a.logy drawn from biological science. For to the biologist and the sociologist it is to be charged--or credited--that the society-as-an-organism formula has found its way into economic thought. And thus hereby a doctrine long since abandoned in economic reasonings is in the way of reappearing; for have we not need of normals and averages? Else our doctrine in getting accurate and actual will get difficult also. And so, by the aid of the sociologist, through the magic of the society-as-an-organism incantation, a resurrection miracle has lately been worked; we salute the average man."

Whether any serious advocate of the organic conception of society will recognize in this caricature the doctrine which he maintains may well be doubted. Certainly it would never occur to us to construct an organism by averaging its organs! Nor do we try to get a social mind by adding a sum of similar physical activities, or even similar mental activities. An organism is a functional unity of _different_ and _complementary parts_.

PART IV

A POSITIVE THEORY OF SOCIAL VALUE

CHAPTER X

VALUE AS GENERIC. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF VALUE

We return, then, to the problem of the nature of value. Value is more than the total utility of a good, or the marginal utility of a good, to an individual, and it is more than a ratio of exchange. Economic value is a species of the _genus_ value, which runs through other social sciences, as ethics, aesthetics, jurisprudence, etc. Sometimes these various values are so intermingled that it is impossible to tell them apart: thus, what kind of value did a human life have in early Germanic jurisprudence, when a _wergeld_ was accepted as compensation for killing a man?

Ethical and legal values we recognize as something very different from the feelings of single individuals, and also as something very different from abstract ratios. In fact, the idea of quant.i.tative ratios in connection with moral values is somewhat startling--though we do apply the "times judgment" pretty far, and say, "he's twice the man the other fellow is," or "this isn't half as bad as that." But we do not go into refinements, ordinarily, and try to make the ratios more exact, as by saying that the value of this n.o.ble deed is three and three eighths times as great as that.

The quant.i.tative measure of legal value is a more familiar idea. Thus, a man gets five dollars fine for a plain drunk, and twenty-five dollars for getting drunk and "cussin' around" (a scale of "prices" recently established in the court of a Missouri Justice of the Peace), or three years in the penitentiary for one crime, and ten years for another. Here we have quant.i.tative measurements of values, but still it is rather strange to our thought to speak of a ratio of exchange between them. We have no occasion to exchange them ordinarily, even though it may happen that a criminal, in contemplating the chances of success in two alternative depredations, will weigh the penalties to which he would be liable in the two cases against each other; and, indeed, the law of supply and demand holds here also (though inversely applied, for we are dealing with negative values). If a particular crime (as "Black-Handing") increases rapidly, we increase the penalty on it to bring it to a stop. But this generalization of the idea of value ought to make clear one thing: exchange, at least in its ordinary meaning,[119] is not the essence of value. Exchange is a factor in estimating value only in economic life. And even there, values are often estimated without actual exchange, and the art of accountancy has arisen for that purpose.

An exhaustive study of this generic aspect of value lies, of course, outside the scope of this book. Ehrenfels, Meinong, and others,[120] have made fruitful investigations in the psychology of value, with primary reference to the problems of ethical value, while Gabriel Tarde, approaching the subject with a sociological, rather than psychological or ethical interest, has also made some illuminating suggestions. The most comprehensive work in English, from the psychological point of view, is by Professor W. M. Urban, whose _Valuation_ appeared in 1909. His interest is also chiefly in ethical, rather than economic, value. Reference has been made in an earlier footnote[121] to Simmel's views. There is, in fact, a rich literature on the subject. The theory of economic value to be developed in this volume, however, is relatively independent of many of the theories treated in this literature, since, as will appear later, the question I wish to raise is, not so much as to the fundamental nature of value, in its psychological aspects, but rather, as to _what_ individual values (and in what _relations_) are significant for the explanation of the particular sort of value with which the economist is concerned. The exposition which follows will be clearer, however, if a psychological theory of value be premised, and the discussion of social economic value will gain from a consideration of ethical and other forms of value, in their sociological aspects, as treated by some of the writers named. The rest of this chapter will be concerned with the problem of value as it presents itself in individual psychology, and later chapters will treat the problem of social value.

_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 quant.i.ties.[124] And they must first _exist_, as such quant.i.ties, 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 a.n.a.lytically, 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 a.n.a.lytical 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 pa.s.sive, a.s.sociationalistic, 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 circ.u.mstances. As stated, if we _have_ the object we value, the element of desire must be reduced to an _att.i.tude_, 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 aesthetic 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, kinaesthetic 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 a.s.sumption 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 a.n.a.lytical process, sundered subject and object, and then, within the subject, have discriminated phases which psychological a.n.a.lysis 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 quant.i.ty 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 pa.s.s 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.

Values are positive and negative.[137] A "fearful sight" repels us, has a negative value, tends, to the extent of its strength, to make us withdraw.

A bad act, an ugly woman, a cruel man,--here we have negative values.

Little need be said further with reference to this point. They alike are motivating forces, the positive values attracting us, the negative values repelling us.

The question of the relations among values we shall discuss rather briefly, not that it is unimportant, but that much of it is familiar. Values may be complementary--as when several objects are all essential to one another if any of them are to be of use. Values may depend on other values, as the value of the means depends on the value of the end, which is its essential "presupposition." Values may antagonize each other, and here two cases are to be distinguished, which differ so much in degree that the difference may be regarded as qualitative. Values may be in their nature quite compatible, so that nothing in their character prevents the realization of both, but there may not be _room_ enough for both, owing to the limitation of our resources,--as when the young lady of our ill.u.s.tration had only six seats at her dinner, and so was obliged to exclude some of her friends. But the values may be qualitatively incompatible. We may be unable to realize them both because the one involves a different sort of _self_ from the self that could realize the other. This is the typical case in ethical values, where the presuppositions, especially in ethical crises, involve the whole personality. In case of such conflicts, say between the value of Sabbath observance and the allurement of Sunday baseball in the case of an orthodox "fan," we may have, as before indicated, a mere mechanical haul and stress, in which one or the other wins by sheer force, to the very considerable discomfort of the uneasy victim. But the conflict may lead to a reexamination of the presuppositions of each value, to a process of bringing each into more organic relation to the whole system of values. In this process, other values may be called into play, may reenforce one or the other of the two alternative values. And, after such a process, both values may be different from what they were. There may emerge some higher value which comprehends them both, or one may be reduced to a minor place, and the other may prevail. Values are no more permanent than any other phase of the mental life. Constant transformations, even though not always fundamental transformations, take place.

There is another case which is so familiar to economists that it need merely be adverted to. Where objects of value are indivisible, we must take one _or_ the other, if there be a conflict. But, in the case of qualitatively compatible objects, a different situation is the rule. We may have _part_ of one, _and_ part of the other, and the question arises as to _how much_ of each. Here the Austrian a.n.a.lysis gives us an answer, which, when we generalize it, despite its antiquated psychology, may be accepted with little modification.[138] The law of "diminishing utility" as we increase the increments of each object, holds, and the problem is that of a marginal equilibrium. The young lady of our ill.u.s.tration would certainly have her chum if she have only one dinner, but if she have a number of dinners, the "marginal utility" of her chum's presence may sink so low that she may find the presence of some one hitherto excluded more valuable at the sixth or seventh dinner. And, indeed, our conception of qualitatively incompatible values must not be made too absolute. Human nature is accommodating and practical, and a little wickedness may be tolerated by a good man for the sake of a value which would not induce him to tolerate more. He may find the "final increment" of his Sabbath observance lower than the "initial increment" of his Sunday baseball.

Two antagonistic values may cohere in the same object. Our _fearful_ sight may also be an _interesting_ sight. And the initial increment of the interest may outweigh the initial increment of the fear. But, as the interest is partially satisfied, the fear may grow, until it finally overcomes the interest, and we flee. Indeed, it may be laid down as the law of negative values that as the "supply" increases (_caeteris paribus_) the negative value rises--the obverse of the law of "diminishing (positive) utility"--a doctrine recognized, in one of its aspects, in the economic doctrine of "increasing (psychic) costs."

A further point is to be noted in the case (especially though not exclusively) of these qualitatively incompatible values, where a quant.i.tative compromise of the sort described is worked out between them.

The personality itself may change, through a growing familiarity with the negative value. It may cease to be a negative value, and may become positive. And if, as may happen, this change takes place quickly, in the course of a moral crisis, our process would be, first, a gradually increasing negative value, as the "supply" of the objects of negative value is increased; next, a sudden shift from a high negative to a high positive value, as the personality changes, and we come to love what we have hated; then a gradual sinking of the new positive value as the supply is still further increased.[139]

The case of the conflict between qualitatively incompatible values is the typical case of the conflict between "duty and pleasure," between "obligation and inclination," etc. Certain values present themselves as "categorical imperatives," as "absolute universals," and refuse, or tend to refuse, any compromise. Our a.n.a.lysis would tend to cast doubt on the "absolute absoluteness" of these values (taking absolute in the sense in which it has been used in the history of ethics, as distinguished from the sense in which I have earlier used it in this book[140]). The most significant thing about these "absolute" values from the standpoint of our present inquiry, seems to be the resistance which they offer to the "marginal process." They seem to insist that their objects be taken _in toto_ or not at all. They tend to universalize themselves, attaching to the remotest possible increment of the "supply" quite as strongly as to the initial increments. They refuse to place their objects in a scale of "diminishing utility." Such values are those which have been so fortified by habit and education that they are vital parts of the personality, and that any compromise where they are involved seems treason to the inmost self. If we wish to make precise a.n.a.logies between our social and our individual values, we shall find here the nearest approach in the individual field to those fundamental legal values which determine the inmost character of the state, and which present themselves as "practical absolutes" in the legal value system, e.g., democracy, or personal liberty--or fundamental sociological values, like the "color line."

It will be noted, further, that our a.n.a.lysis draws no hard and fast lines between the different sorts of value, ethical, economic, esthetic, religious, personal, etc., in the sphere of the individual's psychology.

Such lines do not exist. There are shadings, gradations, quant.i.tative differences which become distinct enough to justify a cla.s.sification of values. But values never become, on the functional side, so fundamentally different in character that there can be no reduction of them to the "common denominator" of power in motivation. And especially is that a false abstraction which would separate the different sorts of value, ethical, economic, etc., into separate, water-tight systems, and let each system have its own equilibrium and its own interactions, uninfluenced by the other systems. The fact is, simply, that ethical and esthetic values may constantly reinforce economic values, economic values reinforce ethical values, or economic and ethical or other values may oppose each other, and marginal equilibria are constantly worked out between them. Or, better, _among_ them, for, while in the consciousness of the moment we may have only _two_ opposing values in mind, and may have our equilibrium apparently between just two, yet in fact the whole system of values is constantly tending toward equilibrium, ethical, religious, economic, esthetic, all a.s.serting themselves, and finding their place in the scale, and getting their "margins" fixed,--extensive margins and intensive margins. But this is so obviously merely a generalization of well-known economic laws, that further detail is needless. One point may be mentioned, however. _Price_ is to be generalized in the same way as value. Since this equilibrium among values holds, then any object of value may be used to _measure_ the value of any other. If the presence of her chum at the fifth dinner is in equilibrium with the presence of some hitherto excluded friend, for our young lady, then the one is the _price_ of the other, and measures her value. A material good which one takes in return for an immoral act is the price of that act. And if, in a moment of fundamental ethical crisis, a man surrenders a cherished purpose about which his whole life has been built, to the allurement of some dazzling temptation, it is much more than a metaphor to speak of "the price of a soul."[141]

The Austrian a.n.a.lysis was essentially faulty, then, not so much in its hedonistic psychology--for it can be freed from that[142]--as in its abstraction of the economic from other aspects of the individual's value system. Equilibria among economic values will not explain even the individual's economic behavior--do not by any means const.i.tute a self-complete system. This abstraction has been noted before.[143] The other abstraction of the Austrians, the abstraction of the individual from his vital, organic connection with the social whole, we shall treat more fully later.

So far, we have kept pretty strictly within the field of "individual psychology" and "individual values." But we shall find, when we come to the field of the social values, that essentially the same laws hold. On the _functional_ side, the a.n.a.logy between the individual mind and the social mind is a very close one, and the correspondences on the _structural_ side are numerous also. While we shall not try to find a.n.a.logies in the social field for all these laws of individual value, it is not because of any difficulty that the problem presents, but rather, because it is unnecessary for the vindication of our thesis to do so.

FOOTNOTES:

[119] See the discussion of Simmel's contention, _supra_, p. 19, n.

[120] Ehrenfels, C., _System der Werttheorie_, Leipzig, 1897; Kreibig, J.

C., _Psychologische Grundlegung eines Systems der Werttheorie_, Vienna, 1902; Kallen, H. M., "Dr. Montague and the Pragmatic Notion of Value,"