THE TIME-PROCESS AND THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE. II.
IN our first article we considered the way in which men's estimate of the values that are realized in a human life is affected by the temporal position of the various realizations. We commonly estimate the worth of life in terms of the four values—moral, intellectual, aesthetic, and affective.[1] These four, we found, differ in the extent to which they can be separated from the life of the individual and considered by themselves: the intellectual and aesthetic values are more impersonal, and thus more readily detached, than are the moral and affective. That aspect in which they are most completely fused with the personality is revealed in intellectual and æsthetic activity, as distinguished from its products. And if we take this activity in the broadest sense, as including such mental alertness and sensitiveness as may characterize even persons of ordinary ability, we have these two more impersonal values in a form in which we can compare them fairly well with the more personal ones, goodness and pleasure.
Now we found that when men try to estimate the value of a particular human life, the question of the temporal relations plays an important role. The worth of an individual life, apparently, does not depend simply upon the degree in which any or all of these four values are realized in it: their presence in its later stages counts for more than their presence in the earlier ones. If a given value is to be more completely realized in one part of the life than in another, we regard it as desirable
- ↑ Whether religious value, as distinct from moral, should be added to this list is a question upon which we did not enter. For the purposes of our discussion it seemed permissible to leave it undecided, for the reason that even if the religious value is quite distinct, it stands in precisely the same relation to our problem as does the moral value, so that no new point of view would be gained by considering it separately. Throughout the discussion, moreover, the term 'moral value' has been used to designate inner attainment, the worth of the personality, rather than outward act.
