ical
students. As medievalism, the century of enlightenment, and the century
of industrial revolution, each had its ethics, so the century that
follows ought to have its ethics, roused by the problem of dealing
fundamentally with economic, social, racial, and national relations, and
using the resources of better scientific method than belonged to the
ethical systems which served well their time.

Only wilful misinterpretation will suppose that the method here set
forth is that of taking every want or desire as itself a final
justification, or of making morality a matter of arbitrary caprice. But
some may in all sincerity raise the question: "Is morality then after
all simply the shifting mores of groups stumbling forward--or backward,
or sidewise--with no fixed standards of right and good? If this is so
how can we have any confidence in our present judgments, to say nothing
of calling others to an account or of reasoning with them?" What we have
aimed to present as a moral method is essentially this: to take into our
reckoning all the factors in the situation, to take into account the
other persons involved, to put ourselves into their places by sympathy
as well as conceptually, to face collisions and difficulties not merely
in terms of fixed concepts of what is good or fair, and what the right
of each party concerned may be, but with the conviction that we need new
definitions of the ideal life, and of the social order, and thus
reciprocally of personality. Thus harmonized, free, and responsible,
life may well find new meaning also in the older intrinsic goods of
friendship, aesthetic appreciation and true belief. And it is not likely
to omit the satisfaction in actively constructing new ideals and working
for their fulfilment.

Frankly, if we do not accept this method what remains? Can any one by
pure reason discover a single forward step in the treatment of the
social situation or a single new value in the moral ideal? Can any
analysis of the pure concept of right and good teach us anything? In the
last analysis the moral judgment is not analytic but synthetic. The
moral life is not natural but spiritual. And spirit is creative.

VALUE AND EXISTENCE IN PHILOSOPHY, ART, AND RELIGION

HORACE M. KALLEN

He who assiduously compares the profound and the commonplace will find
their difference to turn merely on the manner of their expression; a
profundity is a commonplace formulated in strange or otherwise obsc