Part 38

Accordingly there can be no distinction of ends, some as ethical, others as economic, but from an ethical standpoint indifferent, and yet others as amenable neither to ethical nor to economic judgment. The type of situation and the corresponding mode of judgment employed determines whether an end shall be for the time being ethical, economic, or of neither sort conspicuously.

The right of Prudence to rank among the virtues cannot, on our present view, be questioned. Economic judgment, though it must be valuation of means, is essentially choice of ends--and, as would appear, choice of a sort peculiarly difficult by reason of the usually slight intrinsic relation between the ends involved and also by reason of the absence of effective points of view for comparison. Culture, as Emerson remarks, "sees prudence not to be a several faculty, but a name for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and its wants." And again, "The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy.... [The true prudence] takes the laws of the world whereby man's being is conditioned, as they are, and keeps these laws that it may enjoy their proper good" (Essay on Prudence).

Here again we purposely use inaccurate language. Strictly, the ends here spoken of as competing are such, we must say, only because they are as yet in a measure indeterminate, wanting in "clearness," and are not yet understood in their true economic character; likewise the means are wanting in that final shade or degree of physical and mechanical determinateness which they are presently to possess as means to a finally determinate economic end. Thus economic judgment, by which is to be understood determination of an end of action by the economic method and in accordance with economic principles, involves in general physical re-determination of the means. The means which at the outset of the present economic judgment-process appear as physically available indifferently for either of the tentative ends under consideration are only in a general way the same means for knowledge as they will be when the economic problem has been solved. They are, so far as now determinate, the outcome of former physical judgment-processes incidental to the definition of economic ends in former situations like the present.

In our discussion of this preliminary question there is no attempt to furnish what might be called an analysis of the consciousness of objectivity. This has been undertaken by various psychologists in recent well-known contributions to the subject. For our purpose it is necessary only to specify the intellectual and practical attitude out of which the consciousness of objectivity arises; not the sensory "elements" or factors involved in its production as an experience.

So, on the other hand, our vague organic sensations are possibly more instructive as they are, for their own purpose, than they would be if more sharply discriminated and complexly referred.

For convenience we here meet the view under consideration with its own terminology; we by no means wish to be understood as indorsing this terminology as psychologically correct. The sense-quality of which we read in "structural psychology" is, we hold, not a structural unit at all, but in fact a highly abstract development out of that unorganized whole of sensory experience in which reflective attention begins. There is, for example, no such thing as the simple unanalyzable sense-quality "red" in consciousness until judgment has proceeded far enough to have constructed a definite and measured experience which may be symbolized as "object-before-me-possessing-the-attribute-red." In place of the original sensory total-experience we now have a more or less developed perceptual (i. e., judgmental) total-experience. It is an instance of the "psychological fallacy" to interpret what are really elements of meaning in a perceived object constructed in judgment (for this is the true nature of the "simple idea of sensation" or "sense-element") as so many bits of psychical material which were isolated from each other at the outset, and have been externally joined together in their present combination.

The phrase is Külpe's and is used in his sense of consciousness taken as a whole, as, for example, attentive, apperceptive, volitional, rather than in the sense made familiar by Spencer and others.

The foregoing discussion is in many ways similar to Brentano's upon the same subject. In discussing his first class of modes of consciousness, the Vorstellungen, he says: "We find no contrasts between presentations excepting those of the objects to which the presentations refer. Only in so far as warm and cold, light and dark, a high note and a low, form contrasts can we speak of the corresponding presentations as contrasted; and, in general, there is in any other sense than this no contrast within the entire range of these conscious processes" (Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte, Bd. I, p. 29). This may stand as against any attempt to find contrast between abstract sense-qualities taken apart from their objective reference. What is, however, the ground of distinction between the presented objects? Apparently this must be answered in the last resort as above. In this sense we should need finally to interpret "sensuous" and "material" in terms of objectivity as above defined, rather than the reverse. They are cases in or specifications of the determination of adequate stimuli.

In this connection reference may be made to the well-known disturbing effect of the forced introduction of attention to details into established sensori-motor co-ordinations, such as "typewriting," playing upon the piano, and the like.

Cf. PROFESSOR BALDWIN'S Social and Ethical Interpretations, and PROFESSOR MCGILVARY'S recent paper on "Moral Obligation," Philosophical Review, Vol. XI, especially pp. 349 f.

Manifestly, as indicated just above, this accepted value of the object implies fuller physical knowledge of the object than was possessed at the outset of the economic judgment. See above, p. 234, note; p. 246, note 3; and p. 271, below.

Types of Ethical Theory, Vol. II, p. 5.

See p. 253 above.

It is not so much the case that the object, on the one side, excites in the agent's consciousness, on the other, the "sensations of resistance" which have played such a part in recent controversy on the subject, as that (1) the object in certain of its promptings is "resisting" certain other of its promptings, or that (2) certain "positive" activities of the agent are being inhibited by certain "negative" activities, thereby giving rise to the "emotion of resistance." That "positive" and "negative" are here used in a teleological way will be apparent. It is surely misleading to speak of "sensations of resistance" even in deprecatory quotation marks, except as "sensation" is used in its everyday meaning, viz., experience of strongly sensory quality.

The general theory of emotion which is here presupposed, and indeed is fundamental to the entire discussion, may be found in PROFESSOR DEWEY'S papers on "The Theory of Emotion," Psychological Review, Vol. I, p. 553; Vol. II, p. 13.

Such is, in fact, the teaching of the various forms of ethical intuitionism, and we find it not merely implied, but explicitly affirmed, in a work in many respects so remote from intuitionism in its standpoint as GREEN'S Prolegomena to Ethics. See pp. 178-81, and especially pp. 355-9.

Sermon II.

Not to imply of course that psychologically or logically the distinction of conditions and means is other than a convenient superficial one.

Manifestly we have here been approaching from a new direction the "Recognition coefficient" of reality described above. See p. 266.

This, if it were intended as an account of the genesis of psychology as a science and of the psychological interest on the part of the individual, would doubtless be most inadequate. We have, for one thing, made no mention of the part which error and resulting practical failure play in stimulating an interest in the judgmental processes of observation and the like, and in technique of the control of these. Here, as well as in the processes of execution of our purposes, must be found many of the roots of psychology as a science. Moreover, no explanation has been offered above for the appropriation by the "energetic" self of these phenomena of interruption and retardation of its energy as being, in fact, its own, or within itself. The problem would appear to be psychological, and so without our province, and we gladly pass it by.

We can, of course, undertake no minute analysis of the psychological mechanism or concatenation of the process here sketched in barest outline. Our present purpose is wholly that of description. Slight as our account of the process of transition is, we give it space only because it seems necessary to do so in order to make intelligible the accounts yet to be given of the conscious valuation processes for which the movement here described prepares the way.

It will be observed that we assume above that the purpose is successful as planned and by succeeding brings about the undesirable results. Failure in execution of the purpose as such could only, in the manner already outlined, prompt a more adequate investigation of the factual conditions.

The case is not essentially altered in logical character if for the Levitical law be substituted the general principles of the new dispensation read off details by an authoritative church or by "private judgment."

A remark may be added here by way of caution. The presented self, we have said, attenuates to a mere maxim or tacit presumption in favor of a certain type of logical procedure in dealing with the situation. It must be remembered that the presented self, like all other presentation, is and comes to be for the sake of its function in experience, and so is practical from the start. The process sketched above is therefore not from bare presented content as such to a methodological presumption, which, as methodological and not contentual, is qualitatively different from what preceded it.

Recognized authority is, of course, not the same thing by any means as authority unrecognized because absolutely dominant.

We may be pardoned for supplying from the history of ethics no illustrations of this slight sketch.

In fact, as suggested above, the Prolegomena to Ethics is in many respects essentially intuitional in spirit, though its intuitionism is of a modern discreetly attenuated sort.

This would appear to be the logical value of functional psychology as a science of mental process.