normal conditions they promote the personal life. On the other hand, crises may arise when these pleasures, and even the exercise of the finer social qualities, must be foregone simply because they interfere with a good affirmed by a person to be at the time and place of greater worth, as, for example, a scientific investigation or a political reform.
There is, then, no objective and unfailing touchstone of ethical values. The generic concept of 'the highest good' can only be defined formally as a maximum system of personal and social values determinable by individual experience. Hence the 'good' must always involve an individual and seemingly contingent element, irreducible to the categories of actual social morality and not fully definable in its concrete character. It is doubtful if any common predicate can be established for things that are good except that of relation to a conscious self. Society may furnish both means for the actualization of personal values and stimulus for their affirmation. But some of these values at least originate from the inderivable and inexplicable[1] depths of the individual nature. Every individual who lives in part by reflective ethical insight is not necessarily a social innovator, critic, or rebel on a large scale. But every such individual is in posse an over-social or transcendent factor in actual society.
It might seem that the outcome of the above argument is really to reduce practical ethics to anarchy, and to leave no scope for objective ethical theory over and above sociology or social philosophy. But this is not the case. Notwithstanding the contingent and rationally irreducible element of the good as personal experience, there is a basis of common over-individual structure and tendency in individual spirits. The very existence of society and of science are evidence of this. Not only do individuals possess a common reason, but, through their very individualities, they embody in diverse proportions and relations common tendencies of feeling and action. In matters of justice, truth-telling, self-control, there is a general tendency common to civilized men.
- ↑ Inderivable, i.e., from any actual social convention, and inexplicable in terms of a social consensus. The individual is the organ of practical reason but, in turn, the 'universal' of the practical reason is dynamic and concrete. It is actualized only in and through a series of individualities.
