Achievement means taking advantage of things; and it is the function of intelligence to present things, roundly and fearlessly, so that they may serve advantage.

The civilization of nature has proceeded pari passu with the abandonment of the notion that nature is predetermined to human ends, and the recognition that nature has odd and careless ways of its own. It is the discovery of the independent mechanisms of nature, that has put tools into the hands of man. The civilization of society has been served best by those who have been most clearly aware of its present failure. Similarly, within any field of individual endeavor, it is the sanguine or complacent temperament that is ineffective. It is the man who has no illusions of success, that veritably succeeds - the man that measures with a cool eye the length he has to go, and can audit his own accounts without over-estimating his assets.

All this would be too obvious to repeat, did it not have an important bearing on the present state of philosophy. The "new enlightenment," with which realism is allied, would extend this principle of success to the larger issues with which religion and philosophy have to do; but finds that the ascendant philosophy, romanticism, is based upon another principle. Men are to be reassured and comforted by being guaranteed the eternal preeminence of the good. Their hope is to lie in the fact that the indifference of nature and the failure of man are apparent and not real. Their hope is to be realized by that act of imagination or thought which recovers the whole, and seeing it, judges it to be good. Philosophy is itself to make things good; since no more is necessary to the goodness of things than their "synthetic unity."

Realism, on the other hand, proposes that philosophy, like science, shall illuminate things in order that action may be invented that shall make them good. Philosophy must enable man to deal with, and take advantage of, his total environment, as science adapts him to his proximate physi

cal environment. It must exhibit a like forbearance; and avoid confusing the present opportunity, mixed and doubtful as it is, with the dream of consummate fulfilment. For the question, "What shall I do to be saved?" is in principle like any other question of expediency or policy: the answer depends on what actual dangers imperil salvation, and what actual instruments and agencies are available for the achieving of it. To argue the eternal and necessary goodness of things from the implications of knowledge, is to encourage a comfortable assurance concerning salvation, when it is the office of religion to put men on their guard and rouse them to a sense of peril.

If, then, realism is a philosophy of disillusionment, this cannot be said to its disparagement. Realism does, it is true, reject the notion that things are good because they must be thought to be so; but it does not in the least discourage the endeavor to make them good, or discredit the hope that through endeavor they may become good. On the contrary, in the spirit of all true enlightenment, it removes illusions only in order to lay bare the confronting occasion and the available resources of action.

§ 2. A philosophy of life must always contain two principal components, a theory concerning the nature of goodness or value, and a theory concernthe Dependence ing the conditions and prospect of its realization. The former is the central topic of ethics, and the second is the central topic of

Realism and

of Value on

Desire

a philosophy of religion.

In discussing the nature of goodness or value, I find myself in disagreement with certain eminent realists with whom I should much prefer to agree. Mr. G. E. Moore and Mr. Bertrand Russell both contend that goodness is an indefinable quality which attaches to things independently of consciousness. Thus Mr. Moore says: "If I am asked 'What is good?' my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter . . . . Being good, then, is not identical with being willed or felt in any kind of way, any

more than being true is identical with being thought in any kind of way." 1

This view arises, I believe, largely from a misconception of the precise scope of that fundamental realism to which both of these writers subscribe. There are two realistic contentions that are germane to the question of values. In the first place, consciousness is a relation into which things enter without forfeiting their independence. To be conscious of a means that it is acted on in a peculiar manner; and while this action gives a a new status and new connections, it does not condition the being of a, or give it its character as a. Thus if I desire a, it becomes a thing desired, and is connected in a new way with the other things which I desire, or with the things I remember, perceive, etc.; while it nevertheless is, and is a, quite independently of this circumstance. But it is entirely conceivable that the value of a should consist in its being desired; in other words, in that specific relationship which the desiderative consciousness supplies. We should then say that the being or nature of things is independent of their possessing value, but not that their possessing value is independent of consciousness; any more than Mr. Russell himself would say that a proposition's being true is independent of consciousness, although the proposition itself is quite independent of its being true.2

In the second place, it is essential to realism to maintain that a proposition is independent of its being judged. But, as we shall presently see, this in no way contradicts the supposition that values are functions of consciousness. For it is quite possible that the proposition, 'I desire a,' should be quite independent of all opinion in the matter. What I actually desire is dependent neither on what you think about it, nor even on what I think about it myself.

In any case, there seems to be no doubt of the fact that

1 Cf. Moore: Principia Ethica, pp. 6, 137. Cf. Russell: "The Elements of Ethics," in his Philosophical Essays, pp. 4-15.

Cf. above, p. 325.

things do derive value from their being desired, and possess value in proportion as they are desired. This is not to be deduced, and so far, Messrs. Moore and Russell are correct, from the general idealistic arguments. It is not to be argued from the fact that whenever values are found they stand in relation to the finding of them. It is to be argued only from the fact that whenever values are found they stand in relation to some desire or interest, the present finding being itself entirely negligible. Thus, if a value may be represented as (a) R (M1), where a is anything, R is the relation characteristic of consciousness, and M1 a particular desiring subject; then, the finding of value must be represented as [(a) R (M1)] R (M2), where M2 represents the finding subject, and where the smaller relationship is quite independent of the larger. Nevertheless we find empirically that anything whatsoever acquires value when it is desired. There is no quality, or combination of qualities, that is inherently valuable; or incapable of possessing value; or exclusively valuable in the sense that things must be valueless without it. Such interests as that of desultory curiosity, or promiscuous acquisitiveness, may invest anything with value; and there is nothing so precious that its value would not disappear if all needs, likings, and aspirations were extinguished. 83. As value in general arises from a relation to The Nature of interest, so moral value arises from the comMoral Value. plexity and mutual relations of interest. To The Right and understand the peculiar character of moral value it is necessary to introduce two conceptions, that of rightness, and that of comparative goodness. Rightness is the character possessed by action that conduces to goodness. When an interest is confronted by an occasion, or particular phase of the environment, there is an action which will so meet the occasion as to fulfil the inter

the Best

1 For a fuller treatment of this topic, cf. the author's article entitled "The Definition of Value" in Jour. of Phil., Psych. and Scientific Methods, Vol. XI, 1914, No. 6; and his Moral Economy, Ch. I, II (on moral value), and Ch. V (on aesthetic value).

2 Cf. Moore: op. cit., §§ 77, 85.

est. This is the right act in the premises. Thus an organism governed by the instinct of self-preservation will act rightly if it takes the food and leaves the poison, or attacks the weaker enemy and shuns the stronger. The right act is the act which takes advantage of circumstance; advantage being relative at the same time both to the interest which governs the agent, and to the situation which confronts him.

But rightness is not necessarily moral; it may be merely intelligence or expediency. Moral values appear only when there is a question of comparative value. And this question arises from the contact and conflict of interests. That which is one interest's meat is another's poison. The act which is right in that it promotes one interest, is, by the same principle, wrong in that it injures another interest. There is no contradiction in this fact, any more than in the fact that what is above the man in the valley is below the man on the mountain. There is no contradiction simply because it is possible for the same thing to possess several relations, the question of their compatibility or incompatibility being in each case a question of empirical fact.

Now just as an act may be both right and wrong in that it conduces to the fulfilment of one interest and the detriment of another; so it may be doubly right in that it conduces to the fulfilment of two interests. Hence arises the conception of comparative goodness. If the fulfilment of one interest is good, the fulfilment of two is better; and the fulfilment of all interests is best. Similarly, if the act which conduces to goodness is right, the act that conduces to more goodness is more right, and the act which conduces to most goodness is most right. Morality, then, is such performance as under the circumstances, and in view of all the interests affected, conduces to most goodness. In other words, that act is morally right which is most right.

It follows that in the moral sense an act cannot be both right and wrong. It is quite possible that the maximum goodness should be equally well promoted by several acts,