nation, with an emphasis all on the side of giving people what
they deserve rather than of making them capable of deserving more.
Professor Fite's position I regard as conceiving consciousness itself
too largely in the category of the identical and the static rather than
in the more "conscious" categories of constant reconstruction. When by
virtue of consciousness you conceive new ends in addition to your former
particular ideas of present good the problem is, he says, "to secure
perfect fulfilment of each of them." The "usefulness" or "advantage" or
"profitableness" of entering into social relations is the central
category for measuring their value and their obligation.

Now the conception of securing perfect fulfilment of all one's aims by
means of society rather than of putting one's own aims into the process
for reciprocal modification and adjustment with the aims of others and
of the new social whole involves a view of these ends as fixed, an
essentially mechanical view. The same is the implication in considering
society from the point of view of use and profit. As previously
suggested these economic terms apply appropriately to things rather than
to intrinsic values. To consider the uses of a fellow-being is to
measure him in terms of some other end than his own intrinsic personal
worth. To consider family life or society as profitable implies in
ordinary language that such life is a means for securing ends already
established rather than that it _proves_ a good to the man who invests
in it and thereby becomes himself a new individual with a new standard
of values. Any object to be chosen must of course have value to the
chooser. But it is one thing to be valued because it appeals to the
actual chooser as already constituted; it is another thing to be valued
because it appeals to a moving self which adventures upon this new
unproved objective. This second is the distinction of taking an interest
instead of being interested.

The second point of divergence is that Professor Fite lays greater
stress upon the intellectual side of intelligence, whereas I should deny
that the intellectual activity in itself is adequate to give either a
basis for obligation or a method of dealing with the social problem. The
primary fact, as Professor Fite well states it, is "that men are
conscious beings and therefore know themselves and one another." It
involves "a mutual recognition of personal ends." "That very knowledge
which show