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

A THEORY OF GOOD OR VALUE 443
the traditional answer to these questions, which is that
the ultimate values are truth, moral virtue and beauty,
to which I have added a fourth, happiness.
These values, I affirm, are manifested in particular
things, but in different sorts of particular things, each
value choosing, as it were, an appropriate medium for
its manifestation and exemplification. Thus moral virtue
is manifested in the Characters and dispositions of persons.
We recognize it when it is present in others, and realize
its presence in ourselves when we acknowledge the obli-
gation to do what we call our duty, and are motivated to
pursue for its own sake what the Greeks called the Good.
Beauty is manifested in physical things, in paint and stone
and sound and landscape, or, more precisely, in particular
forms or arrangements of physical things; truth in propositions,
happiness in states of consciousness.
That the Value, Moral Virtue, is the Same in all its
Manifestations. The quality of value is always the same
the dogmatism of these statements must be pardoned;
I have tried to give reasons for them at length elsewhere 1
a value does not, that is to say, vary with variations in
the medium in which it is manifested.
To amplify this statement in its bearing upon ethics,
I mean that it is the same moral virtue which is present
as a common element in all the so-called "virtues", and
it is by reason of the presence of this common element
that we value them. What determines the particular form
of the manifestation of the value which is moral virtue,
whether, for example, in the "virtue" of courage, or of
unselfishness, or of kindliness, is the nature and disposition
of the person in whom the value is manifested, the circumstances,with
which he is confronted, and the training which
he has received.
The Greeks distinguished four cardinal virtues, insight
or wisdom, courage or resolution in face of danger, the
1 In my Motto, Lift and Value, Chapters VI-X, and in my Philosophical
Aspects of Motkrn Scitnct, Chapters X and XL