A. Activity and Reality

I HAVE argued that by calling a thing good we mean that it either is, or is instrumental to, the fulfilment of tendency, and that the ideal is the greatest possible fulfilment of the tendency, or capacity, of the world. I will now speculate upon certain more remote implications of this view. It may well be that the most urgent and most fertile task of philosophy to-day is not speculation but criticism. Certainly speculation on the deeper, or metaphysical, problems is apt to lead the inquirer into treacherous ground. But speculate we must, to the best of our ability. The intellect is untrue to itself if it is afraid to venture into the metaphysical bogs. It must dare, even at the risk of succumbing to the fever and delirium of verbalism. The danger, however, is minimized if we realize it and prepare for it, and remember that in philosophical even more than in scientific speculation all conclusions are to be held tentatively.

The tendency of anything is, in a sense, its drive or thrust to become something more than it is. It is its effort, as it were, to give birth to something new over and above its present existence. It is its potentiality striving to be actual. How scandalously vague an assertion! Yet in some sense it is certainly true. Fulfilment of tendency is a creative act on the part of the extant real, in which it brings new real into being. It is an exfoliation of the real into further richness of actuality. Activity (of every kind) is the all-pervading miracle of the universe, an all-pervading creativeness. Everything in the last resort turns out to be some mode of activity, everything from a piece of lead to a symphony. There is in a sense nothing whatever but activity, and the universal characters which it assumes, and certain principles or laws, some few of which it logically must illustrate, while others it merely does express. The former we may indeed deduce; the latter we can but discover. But the fact that there is activity, in diverse modes, is entirely beyond the reach of reason. It just is — the all-pervading creativeness of the real.

We have supposed that more complex kinds of activity emerge into being in the organization of units of simpler kinds of activity. On the physical plane there is only physical tendency, and the only fulfilment is physical. On higher planes of organization the real assumes new tendencies. It does not, we have supposed, fulfil tendencies that were active all the while, but repressed; for the new tendencies presuppose the higher organization. We may say, if we like, that the real had all the while the ‘capacity’ of expressing itself in the higher tendencies when organized; but, until the proper organization was achieved, there was no ‘straining’, so to speak, to behave in the new way. The tendency is not in the isolated parts, but only in the complex. By ‘capacity’ we must mean, here as always, no more than that the simple parts are such that, if they were organized, they would form a whole with certain tendencies.

Let us consider the ethical bearing of this creativeness of the real. The good, we said, is the greatest possible fulfilment of tendency, and of the capacity of substances to co-operate for the creation of higher emergent activities or tendencies. We now see a further implication of this view. The good is in general the greatest possible actualization of the potentiality of the real, the fullest expression of the nature of the real. And the real expresses itself most fully in the fulfilment of tendencies emergent in organism. In the activity which constitutes an organism new reality is brought into being. And the ideal, as we have seen, involves that the world should be organized so as to express itself in the highest possible emergent tendencies, and their fulfilment. This constitutes the fullest actualization of the potentiality of the real, the bringing into being of the richest possible reality of which the present actual is capable.
B. Implications of Being Admired

One of the tendencies of organized reality is the psychical tendency to know, will and feel. Perhaps it might better be called ‘capacity’ rather than ‘tendency’, since, without any object to experience, experience is impossible. But the physical organism itself constitutes an ever present object to its own subjectivity, and in the organism itself lie the objective tendencies that are first conated. Moreover just as, in our earlier discussion of tendency, we were led to say that organisms have in themselves tendencies which demand a certain environment for their fulfilment, so now once more we must hold that this psychical capacity of organisms constitutes in them strictly a tendency demanding an environment for its fulfilment.

Now the psychical capacity may be called a capacity for cognizing the real and its tendency, and for willing and enjoying its fulfilment. In fact it is essentially a capacity for knowing and admiring andserving the real’s exfoliation into new reality.

We have agreed that, in any given situation, it is good that actual psychical tendency be fulfilled; for fulfilment, or progressive fulfilling, is what we essentially mean by ‘good’, and psychical fulfilment is no less fulfilment than any other kind. The act of knowing, willing and enjoying is itself an emergence of new reality; though, as we have seen, false cognition and irrational conation and affection are but imperfect fulfilments of psychical capacity.

A very important problem must now be faced. Is true cognition and rational conation and affection good solely in that it constitutes the fulfilment of the experient’s capacity and may be instrumental to objective fulfilment in the environment? Or does being known, willed and admired constitute in itself an intrinsic fulfilment of the object? Does the objective world, in some obscure sense, need to be the object of psychical activity, need to be known and willed and admired? Surely, it may be said, this cannot be the case, unless we are mistaken in holding (as we have held throughout this inquiry) that mere knowing makes no difference to its object, save indirectly. It is true, of course, that, in a certain sense and in certain cases, volition makes a difference to its object. I will to move my hand, and my hand moves. But in the great majority of cases volition takes effect indirectly upon its object, though always the medium must be some case of direct influence of volition upon the body. 93 Anyhow it would seem that objects are not themselves benefited in any way simply by being objects of psychical activity. To suppose otherwise must seem an indulgence in unwarranted fantasy.

But (since we are frankly speculating) let us pursue the matter somewhat further. In the first place we may note that, when the object is one that is capable of knowing that it is the object of psychical activity, it may very well be benefited by being known and admired and by having its fulfilment willed. Human beings commonly find that to be valued is an end in itself. To be an object of love, no less than to be a loving subject, is judged to be in itself a fulfilment demanded by our nature. This fact is often attributed to our social or our sexual dispositions’ and certainly it would be illegitimate to infer from it alone that all objects are intrinsically benefited by being objects of psychical activity.

Nevertheless, it is worth while to inquire what it is that we do experience when we rejoice in being valued. Roughly, what we feel when we are valued is that ‘we have not lived in vain’. Apart from a merely selfish pursuit of pleasure, there seem to be two kinds of fulfilments worthy to be sought. A man may hope that his behaviour may be instrumental (in however microscopic a measure) to the fulfilment of that which is objective to him as an experient. But also in so far as he is himself intrinsically excellent, in so far as his cognition is true and rich, and his conation just, this excellence of his may, so to speak, be saluted, confirmed, crowned, by the admiration of his fellows or the affection of some few intimates, or the love of a life-long companion. Without such admiration he may feel that, though he may have done good work in the world, he, as a source of intrinsic value, has missed complete fulfilment, in that he has not brought into being all the excellence of which he was capable, namely the psychical reals which we call admiration and love. He may feel, in fact, that in failing to be known and valued he fails (thus far) to be woven into the tissue of psychic reality. He is a loose thread. And so, not only does he fall short of self-fulfilment, but also the whole of reality falls short of fulfilment in respect of his absence from the psychic tissue. The sense of not being valued, then, is a sense of not being adequately gathered up into the unity of things.

Now it matters little for our present purpose whether this experience is due to a specific disposition, social or sexual; for whatever its psychological source, it is logically justified. The admiration of intrinsic values does, as a matter of fact, constitute an emergence of new reality. In failing to be admired, an intrinsically good object does not fulfil all its capacity. Further, since value does not depend on the act of valuation, the fact that an intrinsically good object has fulfilled its capacity of being admired constitutes an additional good, whether the object is aware of being admired or not.

This does not mean that the admirer’s cognition creates the value of the object itself. The object’s value is intrinsic. The admirer cognizes it and espouses it. This espousal, or admiration, itself constitutes a new value, which is a fulfilment of the psychical subjective capacity of the admirer, and also a fulfilment of the ‘psychical objective capacity’ of the object. It is in fact an emergent fulfilment.

After all, then, it is not mere fantasy to say that the objective world needs to be known and admired and to have its fulfilment willed; for everything that is intrinsically valuable is capable of producing further value in being admired. Even objects which are not intrinsically good, and are admired erroneously, obtain in a sense fulfilment in being admired. For the cause of an erroneous value-judgment is always the apprehension of some true value. (The erroneous admiration of a villain must be attributed to the true apprehension of the excellence of some of his attributes). In respect, then, of its good attributes the bad object is fulfilled in being admired. But the object as a whole, which by hypothesis is not good but bad,. does not in strictness obtain fulfilment in being admired. For the admiration which it arouses is unjustified. It is admiration for something which is not admirable, which does not in its own nature demand admiration. The admiration which it gets is not strictly its fulfilment at all. Further, the experient who thus erroneously admires, incurs an evil discord within himself. The objective world as a whole, moreover, is not benefited by admiration of things within it that are not good, for things within it that are not good are antagonistic to its rudimentary unity.

This speculation may, indeed, seem to ignore the principle that knowing, as such, makes no internal difference to its object, save (indirectly) when the object is aware of being known. But if the ideal is the greatest possible fulfilment of the capacities of the universe, it is demanded in the ideal that all intrinsic goods should be contemplated and admired; and this is demanded, not simply because the act of contemplation and admiration constitutes a fulfilment of the subjective psychical capacity of the observer, but also because to be admired fulfils the ‘objective psychical capacity’ of the thing that is admired. In fact it fulfils the thing’s capacity for being an object to some mind, and an admired object, knit within the system of that ‘objective self’. To be admired, then, ‘makes the best of’ good things. For in the cognitive relation of subject and object there emerges this new reality (knowledge and admiration), in which subject and object together find their completion. In this view it remains true in one sense that being known and admired makes no internal difference to an object (just as being photographed makes no internal difference to an object); but on the other hand it is also true in another sense that being known and admired does constitute a fulfilment of the object’s capacity for entering into an emergent subject-object-relationship. Being known and admired makes no difference to that in the object which is known and admired. But it does make a difference to the (ontological) object as an entity capable of playing the part of epistemological object in a subject-object relation, and of co-operating in the creation of the emergent activity of admiration.

I am well aware, howe............