Page:Philosophical Review Volume 18.djvu/238

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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. XVIII.

anticipated or realized of the objective conditions brought about by our endeavors with our desires and our purposes. "And this conception of happiness [at bottom the Aristotelian, the dynamic, instead of the passivistic or the atomistic] is admirably contrasted in the appropriate sections of the book with the old notion, "that it is a sum or collection of separate states of sensation or feeling." As it is put on p. 301, the "true or final happiness of an individual ... lies not in objective achievement of results, but in the supremacy within character of an alert, sincere, and persistent interest in those habits and institutions which forward common ends among men."

An equally ingenious introduction is now made of the third type of ethical theory, the distinction between the Empirical and the Intuitional. The very problem of moral knowledge raises, as it were, the question: Is there a distinct and separate faculty of moral reason? Here Kant is first taken up with the result (the usual result) that his formalism is wrong, but that his contention for the "true rationalization" of desire is justifiable. And then as for the conflict of duty (or a special faculty, or intuition) with desire, we are finally told that this "conflict" is an "accompaniment of a growing self," that disposition as manifest in endeavor is the seat of moral worth, "and that this worth [Professor Dewey's old point of a unification of the teleological and the formal] consists in a readiness to regard the general happiness against contrary promptings of personal comfort and gain." Having now been made to rest upon the needs of a growing self as the apparent explanation of all morality and all moral theory, we are now treated in this part to a disputation new and old upon the place of the Self in morality,—Self-Denial, Self- Assertion, Self-Regard and Other Regard, Self-Realization, etc., in which Nietzsche and Neo-Hegelianism and other things are admirably discussed with the result [the key-note of the book, the dynamic, the liberated, the progressive self] that the essential factor in morality is the "constant formation and reformation of the self in the ends in which an individual is called upon to sustain and develop in virtue of his membership in a social whole." "Our ideals, our types of excellence, are the various ways in which we figure to ourselves the outreaching and ever-expanding values of our concrete acts."

The third part, with its economic and political applications of ethical theory, had better now,—so far as the purposes of adequate description are concerned, be left in the main to the reader. It is somewhat detailed in its treatment, taking up such specialized and controversial topics as the 'open' versus the 'closed' shop, the capi-