n mind will enable us to see
the abstractness and fallacies not merely of libertarianism and
determinism, but of subjectivism and objectivism. Subjective or "inward"
theories have sought standards in the self; but in regarding the self as
an entity independent of such a process as we have described they have
exposed themselves to the criticism of providing only private, variable,
accidental, unauthoritative sources of standards--instincts, or
emotions, or intuitions. The self of the full moral consciousness,
however,--the only one which can claim acceptance or authority--is born
only in the process of considering real conditions, of weighing and
choosing between alternatives of action in a real world of nature and
persons. Its judgments are more than subjective. Objectivism in its
absolutist and abstract forms assumes a standard--nature, essence,
law--independent of process. Such a standard is easily shown to be free
from anything individual, private, or changing. It is universal,
consistent, and eternal, in fact it has many good mathematical
characteristics, but unfortunately it is not moral. As mathematical,
logical, biological, or what not, it offers no standard that appeals to
the moral nature as authoritative or that can help us to find our way
home.

II

If we are dissatisfied with custom and habit and seek to take philosophy
for the guide of life we have two possibilities: (1) we may look for the
good, and treat right and duty as subordinate concepts which indicate
the way to the good, that is, consider them as good as a means, or (2)
we may seek first to do right irrespective of consequences, in the
belief that in willing to do right we are already in possession of the
highest good. In either case we may consider our standards and values
either as in some sense fixed or as in the making.[68] We may suppose
that good is objective and absolute, that right is discovered by a
rational faculty, or we may consider that in regarding good as objective
we have not made it independent of the valuing process and that in
treating right as a standard we have not thereby made it a fixed concept
to be discovered by the pure intellect. The position of this paper will
be (1) that good while objective is yet objective as a value and not as
an essence or physical fact; (2) that a social factor in value throws
light upon the relation between moral and other values; (3) that right
is not merely a means to the good but has an ind