e
adjusting differences by judicial processes, cooeperating to promote
general welfare, enjoying refined and more permanent friendships and
affections, and viewing life in its tragedy and comedy with enhanced
emotion and broader sympathy. Leaving out of consideration the work of
the religious or artistic genius as not in question here, the great
objective agencies in bringing about these changes have been on the one
hand the growth of invention, scientific method, and education, and on
the other the increase in human intercourse and communication. Reason
plays its part in both of these in freeing the mind from wasteful
superstitious methods and in analyzing situations and testing
hypotheses, but the term is inadequate to do justice to that creative
element in the formation of hypotheses which finds the new, and it tends
to leave out of account the social point of view involved in the
widening of the area of human intercourse. More will be said upon this
point in connection with the discussion of rationalism.

(4) The process of judgment and choice. The elements are not the sum.
The moral consciousness is not just the urge of life, plus the social
relations, plus intelligence. The _process_ of moral deliberation,
evaluation, judgment, and choice is itself essential. In this process
are born the concepts and standards good and right, and likewise the
moral self which utters the judgment. It is in this twofold respect
synthetic, creative. It is as an interpretation of this process that the
concept of freedom arises. Four aspects of the process may be noted.

(_a_) The process involves holding possibilities of action, or objects
for valuation, or ends for choice, in consciousness and measuring them
one against another in a simultaneous field--or in a field of
alternating objects, any of which can be continually recalled. One
possibility after another may be tried out in anticipation and its
relations successively considered, but the comparison is essential to
the complete moral consciousness.

(_b_) The process yields a universe of valued _objects_ as distinguished
from a subjective consciousness of desires and feelings. We say, "This
is right," "That is good." Every "is" in such judgments may be denied by
an "is not" and we hold one alternative to be true, the other false. As
the market or the stock exchange or board of trade fixes values by a
meeting of buyers and sellers and settles the price of wheat accurately
enoug