Optimism which refuses altogether to recognize the possibility of a pessimistic view. A sufficient answer to it would seem to be that "living competes with non-living," not only in the case of every suicide—where, it is needless to say, its competition is wholly unsuccessful—but also in the reflective thought of no small portion of mankind, who, at some time in their lives, ask with insistent earnestness whether life has any value at all. Mr. Alexander is forced into this rather strange view by his theory of value, which makes the standard of value to be 'the social equilibrium.' "Value is nothing but the efficiency of a conscious agent to promote the efficiency of society, to maintain the equilibrium of forces which that society represents."[1] But one may surely press the question beyond the individual agent, whose worth is so completely merged in that of society, and ask: What then is the value of society itself? Or, if this question seem to have 'no meaning,' one may at least properly inquire for some principle by which the relative values of different periods or forms of society are determined. Answering this query in the spirit of Mr. Alexander's reflections, one would be compelled to say that the value of any given period or form of society is measured by the contribution which it makes toward the promotion of the efficiency of some other succeeding period or form of society, and so on ad infinitum. Thus no ultimate criterion of value, either of the individual or of society, is offered by him. And one may perhaps be pardoned for comparing his idea of value with that of a certain farmer, who always insisted upon computing the value of his herd in terms of the prospective herd which it was capable of producing. The radical defect in Mr. Alexander's view is the total lack of any psychological principle for the evaluation of the life of the individual, apart from whose consciousness society itself can have no worth or existence.
Insisting, for my own part, upon the significance and legitimacy of the question which Mr. Alexander so summarily assigns to the limbo of the meaningless, I desire to inquire how life itself is evaluated, or, in other words, how its worth is ultimately measured in human experience; and also to suggest the place which the principle of evaluation must hold in an ethical theory.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 54; cf. also his Moral Order and Progress, p. 232.
