therefore disastrous for this second principle of inner sanction. If the "paradox of value," whether in its hedonistic or energistic interpretation, is forever setting limits to the development and expansion of objective values, and if the individual values are bound by the principle of equivalence to the fate of the external values, then only one conclusion is possible, namely, that of Ehrenfels:[1] the principle of progressive imputation of values has no real basis either in the individual or social series, but is rather an æsthetic illusion, the reason for which is to be found in the æsthetic isolation of the bearer of values, the Self, from the system of nature.
We are brought finally to the point where we see that these two principles when abstracted from the subject of valuation and carried over into an external system of nature, are in mutual contradiction, and that this reduces one or both to illusion. This comes out especially clearly in the difficulties encountered in the attempt of Sidgwick to coördinate justice and benevolence. The practical difficulties involved in reconciling justice and benevolence have a profound logical basis. For while distributive justice contemplates merely the establishment of ideal equivalences between the individual's sense of value and the objective values of the social consciousness, on the basis of a mediating quantitative, conception, benevolence has in mind the simple increase of value, as for instance quantity of pleasure in the social series, irrespective of these equivalences. If distributive justice is conceived as an objective apportionment of goods, a correspondence of objective and subjective values, then it implies the existence of a given fixed quantum of some abstract substratum of values, say pleasure, in order that the quantitative process may get started. On the other hand, benevolence, hedonistically interpreted, implies the possibility of an indefinite increase of this substratum of pleasure. But these two assumptions are in contradiction. It is not surprising then that Sidgwick should have felt himself forced to subordinate justice to benevolence, in fact to reduce the former to a purely economic role. He makes it clear to us that, to say nothing of the abstractions of freedom
- ↑ System der Werththeorie, Bd. II, p. 56.
