habit of suppressing instinctive fear and giving freer vent to pugnacity. Masculine Honor is courage plus self-feeling on the part of its possessor. And so of the other virtues, as I have suggested in another connection.[1] In each case, a virtue is critical approval of a mental habit or sentiment involving some desirable adjustment or coordination of instincts. All virtues are moral values, if we desire to distinguish thus, before the philosopher interprets them and makes them ethical values. Ethical systems are always concerned with the relationship between the agent and the objects that he desires. If attention is chiefly directed towards external objects and goods, and less upon the agent's personality, emphasis will be upon intention rather than motive, e.g., in utilitarianism. If attention is upon motives and character, ethics will find in the virtues the chief ethical values, e.g., by Aristotle. Or if attention is directed to the fact that a moral action always involves reasoning, this formal logical process itself, abstracted both from external objects desired and also from the instincts and sentiments which are the determinations of these desires, may be considered of chief ethical value, as is the case in some of the passages in the Critique of Practical Reason. A more concrete ethics would seek to synthesize the values derived from all three of these aspects and understand them in the light of the self as a whole. But the self as a reflective object of valuation appears at a later stage in the evolution of values.
The purely intellectual interest, love of knowledge for its own sake, is also a value and the object of a virtue and a sentiment. The dominant motif in the sentiment for truth[2] and the virtue of wisdom is curiosity or wonder, reinforced by practically all the other instincts as it comes to be felt that knowledge is power—power here signifying effectiveness to accomplish any of the ends and purposes which the various instincts and sentiments desire.
5. Aesthetic values are difficult of analysis, because, for one reason, they owe their origin, not to an instinct with definite
