visual, tactual, auditory, and so on-exhibit such close correspondences with one another that we can build up the notion of a physical world from them? Would he be content to say that the fact is so, and that we have simply to accept it? This surely would not be philosophy, but the abdication of philosophy. The existence of such striking uniformities offers as genuine a problem to the reason as the difficulties which led Mr. Broad to form his theory, and no less insistently challenges him to seek for an explanation. It cannot be supposed that Mr. Broad is unaware of or indifferent to this challenge. W. P. BLEVIN. LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND. THE APPEARANCE OF VALUES HE term "appearance" in the title of this article may TH be interpreted in two senses. It may mean the appearance to us of values, or it may mean simply the appearance in itself, the happening, of values. I wish in what follows to discuss both these meanings. I propose to explore briefly certain problems of our experience of the thing which we call "value," with a view to discovering whether "value" can be defined in terms of the experience of it, or whether it must be thought to possess objective and independent existence, or whether it may in some sense be said to be a product of a subject-object relationship. The first position tends to lead to subjectivism, the second seems satisfactory up to a point, but beyond that presents grave difficulties, whilst the third (which I shall defend) is apt-when it is clearly visualised at all-to be credited with the faults of both and the virtues of neither. I shall begin by discussing views of the relation of values to knowledge. The ordinary commonplace unreflective attitude to values is to regard them as qualities of objects, as belonging to objects in very much the same way as colour and shape belong to them. Commonsense has no theories about the matter, but it would, I suppose, take it as an accepted fact that the values which it distinguishes at all (and it is of course constantly experiencing value without being aware that it is value) belong to the things which yield them. Without making fine distinctions between instrumental values and intrinsic values, unreflective commonsense conceives the value to be in the treasury notes or the land or the iron ore, as the beauty is in the picture. Certainly with regard to the tangible things which commonsense for the most part discerns as most clearly valuable, there is no idea at all that the value may be due to the presence of knowing mind. We know the values as we know the things, they are there in the things, ready to be known. The smallest amount of reflection, however, will induce commonsense to halt and perhaps to recant its first naïve assumptions. There seems to be a difference between a thing's value or worth' and its colour or shape. Money in a napkin hidden in a field is not of real, but only of potential value. Its value becomes real only in use, in relation to the needs of human beings. So of the land or the iron ore. And beauty in its turn would seem to have little real value "in the desert air." It seems important, on second thoughts, that we enjoy beauty; the perfect gramophone playing the Fifth Symphony in the uninhabitated wilderness seems to lack something (if we can think of it apart from ourselves surreptitiously listening in). And with this conviction borne in convincingly and suddenly upon commonsense, it may perhaps spring to the opposite extreme and argue that beauty is "in the mind," or, less correctly, "in the eye" or "ear." Or, with the aid of a little philosophic jargon, commonsense may learn to distinguish between the primary and secondary qualities, and values; and it may call values "tertiary qualities" taking the term tertiary to mean two removes away from reality, or, in other terms, purely mental. But the more subjective position must not be assumed 1 I take the terms here as identical in meaning. without question to be necessarily more "philosophic" than the view which takes values as entirely mind-independent. Dr. G. E. Moore in a well-known passage in his Principia Ethica argues staunchly that values are entirely mind-independent. He says "Let us imagine one world exceedingly beautiful. Imagine it as beautiful as you can; put into it whatever on this earth you most desire-mountains, rivers, the sea, trees, sunsets, stars and moon. Imagine these all combined in the most exquisite proportions, so that no one thing jars against another, but each contributes to increase the beauty of the whole. And then imagine the ugliest world you can possibly conceive. Imagine it simply one heap of filth, containing everything that is most disgusting to us, for whatever reason, and the whole, as far as may be. without one redeeming feature. Such a pair of worlds we are entitled to compare. The only thing we are not entitled to imagine is that any human being ever has, or ever, by any possibility, can live in either, can ever see and enjoy the beauty of the one or hate the foulness of the other. Well, even so, supposing them quite apart from any possible contemplation of human beings; still, is it irrational to hold that it is better that the beautiful world should exist, than the one which is ugly? Would it not be well, in any case, to do what we could to produce it rather than the other? Certainly I cannot help thinking that it would." Again, discussing the arguments of Socrates in the Philebus, Moore says, "If we are really going to maintain that pleasure alone is good as an end, we must maintain that it is good, whether we are conscious of it or not. We must declare it reasonable to take as our ideal (an unattainable ideal it may be) that we should be as happy as possible, even on condition that we never know and never can know that we are happy. 8 2 Principia Ethica, pp. 83-4. 3 Ibid., p. 89. I have quoted Moore's words in full because they express very clearly the point of view that values can exist apart altogether from minds. It is a view difficult to accept. As regards the actual argument of the former of the two cases, it has been pointed out before now that Moore begs the question by introducing his own consciousness into the matter. He says, to begin with, that we must not imagine that any human being ever has enjoyed or can enjoy the beauty of one world and hate the foulness of the other, and then he goes on to say that he himself would hold that the beautiful world ought to exist rather than the ugly. If, on the other hand, we take the content of the argument, we shall find it hard to conceive that beauty should be in the least valuable (apart altogether from the question whether it could even exist) without human minds to appreciate it. And so again of pleasure. We may agree that the pleasure which no one ever knew, that is, pleasure entirely apart from a conscious being, could not be the good or the ideal, but this is just because it could not be a value at all. It is no doubt not impossible that something valuable should happen without any mind being aware of it. But in order to be valuable it would have to be related to consciousness somehow, if only indirectly and ultimately. The processes of digestion which go on within our organisms are highly valuable, and, paradoxically enough, we do not normally realise how valuable they are until they begin to refuse to function. We are not, in health, conscious of digesting food. Yet the value which good digestion possesses is only of value in relation to a conscious living being and its higher functions. Again, a man may quite well be morally good without being aware that he is good. But the value of his goodness could not, so far as I can see, conceivably exist out of all relation to the functioning of his mind. Putting it quite generally, there seem in this connection to be |