alled value has its seat necessarily in
human nature, and what is called existence has its seat necessarily in
the nature of which human nature is a part and apart. Value, in so far
forth, is a content of nature, having its roots in her conditions and
its life in her force, while the converse is not true. All nature and
all existence is not spontaneously and intrinsically a content of value.
Only that portion of it which is human is such. Humanly speaking,
non-human existences become valuable by their efficacious bearing on
humanity, by their propitious or their disastrous relations to human
consciousness. It is these relations which delimit the substance of our
goods and evils, and these, at bottom, are indistinguishable from
consciousness. They do not, need not, and cannot connect all existence
with human life. They are inevitably implicated only with those which
make human life possible at all. Of the environment, they pertain only
to that portion which is fit by the implicated conditions of life
itself. It may therefore be said that natural existence produces and
sustains some values,--at least the minimal value which is identical
with the bare existence of mankind--on its own account, but no more. The
residual environment remains--irrelevant and menacing, wider than
consciousness and independent of it. Value, hence, is a specific kind of
natural existence among other existences. To say that it is non-existent
in nature, is to say that value is not coincident and coexistent with
other existences, just as when it is said that a thing is not red, the
meaning is that red is not copresent with other qualities. Conversely,
to say that value exists in nature is to say that nature and human
nature, things and thoughts, are in some respect harmonious or
identical. Hence, what human nature tries to force upon nature must be,
by implication, non-existent in nature but actual in mind, so that the
nature of value must be held inseparable from the nature of mind.[87]

It follows that value is, in origin and character, completely
irrational. At the foundations of our existence it is relation of their
conditions and objects to our major instincts, our appetites, our
feelings, our desires, our ambitions--most clearly, to the
self-regarding instinct and the instincts of nutrition, reproduction,
and gregariousness. Concerning those, as William James writes, "Science
may come and consider their ways and find that most of them are usefu