GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

A THEORY OF GOOD OR VALUE 441
which is alien from itself, invents personages and values for
its assurance and comfort, and peoples with them the
world outside itself. To primitive man the universe in
some of its moods appears deliberately hostile. He creates,
therefore, spirits, in his own likeness, bearded, jealous,
angry and possessive, projects them outside himself,
gives them a position somewhere above the clouds, and
then solicits their intervention in his favour. The scientist
substitutes the vast impersonality of astronomical space
and geological time for the all-too-human deities that
inform the savage's little world. The scientist's universe, if
less hostile, is more lonely, so lonely, so remote, that man
cannot tolerate the thought of its otherness and his insignificance.
And so he invents the values goodness, truth and
beauty, projects them into the world without, insists that
something worthy of reverence must be at the heart of
things, and proceeds to revere the shadows which he has
cast upon the empty canvas of a meaningless universe.
The explanation is plausible rather than convincing.
Subjectivism is the ethical creed appropriate to the standpoint
of science, whose tendency is to classify man as
an inhabitant of the natural world and to study him as a
product of the natural order. Produced by the forces which
determine the movements of the physical universe, exposed
to the stimuli of a physical environment which has
moulded him and to which he reacts, man's nature cannot,
if regarded from the point of view of the scientist, contain
within itself any elements save what, if I may so phrase
it, the physical environment has put there, or manifest
behaviour save such as its physical environment has
evoked in it. This will be no less true of man's spiritual
and his intuitions of value than of his sexual
aspirations
desires and his physical movements. His spiritual aspirations
and his intuitions of value cannot, then, be completely
meaningless in the sense that they own no counterpart
in the external world, for, since they too are but one of
the forms of man's reaction to a world outside himself,
they cannot but reflect the factors in the external world