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

442 .
ETHICS
to which they are reactions. Thus the very view which
insists upon man's wholly natural origin and die consequent
determination of all the processes of his being, mental as
well as physical, by those forces which operate universally
in the physical world, is precluded by this very insistence
from giving a purely subjectivist account of any of the
expressions of man's nature, and is precluded, therefore,
from giving a purely subjectivist account of his intuitions
of value. These cannot be quite arbitrary; there must be
somttUng in the physical
universe to account for their
existence, to respond to their intimations, and to correspond
to their deliverances since, otherwise, it would be impossible
to account for the fact that we do all possess them. For
if man's intuitions are the reflections of nothing whatever
outside himself, then we must credit him with precisely
that power of spontaneous creation which the naturalistic
view denies.
If, however, in spite of the foregoing considerations it
is still insisted that our intuitions of value are purely
subjective, then, as I have already pointed out in the
chapter on free will, 1 our intuitions of truth will be no
less subjective than our intuitions of other forms of value,
and we shall have no ground on which to claim validity
for any argument. There is, then, no ground for the claim
to validity advanced on behalf of subjectivist arguments.
That Each Form of Value Manifests Itself in a Specific
Medium. The conclusion of the foregoing is that the
fact that we recognize and respond to value is most
readily explicable on the assumption that value exists and is
objectively real. The question, what things are recognized
and responded to as being valuable, is, as I have already
suggested, one of fact. To answer it, we must turn to
history and ask what tilings people have in the past
regarded as valuable in and for themselves, and to
psychology and ask what things people now regard as
being valuable in and for themselves. I have accepted
See Chapter VII, pp. 273, 274.