To recapitulate and at the same time to enlarge somewhat the points thus far covered in Book II: Kant proclaims man an end per se. This promises a philosophic basis for an ethical world-view. The promise is not kept. Kant takes as his point of departure absolute obligation, and attempts to deduce out of an empty formula a worthwhile object. Kant’s formula is: Treat man never merely as a means, but also as an end per se. But how far man may be treated as a means, and what the relation of the means to the end may be is left undetermined. An upper crust of morality is formed, as it were, upon the empirical flood of passions, desires, etc. A straight line is drawn beyond which the under world in every man may not emerge. But a truly instrumental view of the means as related to the end is not established. This is one of the great gaps in Kant’s system. Note the almost puerile reason given for culture: we should cultivate our talents weil sie zu allerhand Zwecken nützlich sein m?gen.  
Kant’s ethical order is a duplicate of the physical order. The notion of law is taken from physics, and expanded into the concept of law in general. Ethical behavior is represented as behavior motivated by the notion of lawfulness. Law is characterized by uni101versality and necessity. Chapter II, however, shows that in physics universality is predicated on the ground of an ascertained necessary connection. In physics, necessity has its true meaning as pertaining to a relation between one thing and another. If the linkage can be established, the universality follows. In Kant’s ethics, on the contrary, necessity is taken as the consequence of the universality and the proper meaning of necessity is lost. Self-consistency takes the place of the relation to something else. The ideal society, as described, would therefore be a society of self-preserving rational intelligences, ethically solipsistic.
 
Next we began the investigation into the idea of worth. Why do men hold themselves and others cheap? They regard each other from the point of view of the use to be made of others and of their own life, and not from the point of view of the energies deployed. The turning on of electric power was used as an illustration. Nevertheless, even exceptional men, men regarded as illustrating in the highest degree the mental energies implicit in human nature, would not possess the quality of worth, that is, of being ends per se, merely on the score of their scientific or their artistic activities. We cannot say that the world would be less perfect if there were no scientists to discover its laws. There is a supreme, a unique energy and it is to this that the quality of worth belongs.26
 
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The ethical quality called worth is the supreme good, and must be accessible to all, even to those to whom the lesser goods are denied. Ethics is a system of thought which stands or falls with the contention that while the better may be within reach only of the exceptional few, the best is within reach of all.
 
In attempting to approach the task of building up a world-view based on ethical experience, it became unavoidable to consider the method by which the approach might be made, and for this purpose to contrast the methods of science and the methods of ethics. Science, as we have seen, collects its bricks and builds its house by composition. Science analyzes phenomena into units, which it then combines. The mystery is how science can achieve certainty in respect to certain phenomena of nature without previous knowledge of the whole of nature. Kant’s answer is that there is partial congruity between the mental functions and the data that come to us from the unknown. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason faces in two directions. It expels the older metaphysics which assumed that the empirical world is rational throughout, or rationalizable, and which thence argued the existence of the unconditioned as necessarily implied in the existence of the conditioned, and of a first cause as actually implied in the chain of causes and effects. Kant contends that there is an irrational element, namely, bare juxtaposition (part outside part), and bare sequence (part before and after part), while the logical or rational relation implies that103 the part is to be conceived as implicit in the whole. Juxtaposition and sequence, therefore, can never be completely rationalized. On the other hand, Kant undertakes to prove that whatever of reality we know is traceable to the projection of the rational factor upon the irrational. One might even say that, according to Kant, the mind itself produces the irrational factor, since the intuitions of space and time are according to him, functions of the mind itself—the mind setting up a manifold so constituted as to receive sense impressions. At any rate the capital point to which we were led up was that science puts her foot on terra firma in a restricted area, without reference to what lies beyond, while if we are to proceed in ethics at all, we must begin with some ideal plan of the whole, since in ethics we are not interpreting a foreign nature, but act upon natures similar to our own; and since, in the case of conduct, there is no such partial concurrence of the rational and irrational as in physics, no one of the so-called moral modes of behavior being moral when taken separately. Hence the conclusion that there is no possibility of establishing the conception of worth unless we have some ideal of the whole in which and in relation to which the incomparable worthwhileness of a human being can be made good.
 
We need hardly again remind ourselves that this conception of worth, or of man as end per se, is not a mere abstraction, and that our interest in it is not academic. Every outcry against the oppression of man by man, or against whatsoever is morally hideous, is but the affirmation of the cardinal principle that a human104 being as such is not to be violated, is not to be handled like a tool, but is to be respected and revered as an end per se. But what do we mean by end per se, and how account for this notion? Does it come into our mind like a bolt from the blue, or is it revealed as prefigured in the human mind when we follow it into its intimate constitution?
 
Our knowledge of the world we live in is extremely limited—in its details it is confined to the planet we live on, extending to the myriads of celestial bodies beyond us only by means of scant generalizations. If we have knowledge of only so small a portion, how can we frame an ideal of the whole? At the same time we must remember that the world we actually know, this earth and yonder starry myriads, is in very truth our world, the world as it exists for us, a world which with the help of data coming to us from the unknown, we ourselves have built up on certain constructive principles; and that these principles have been found, within certain limits, availing.27 I say availing within certain limits. The defeat they meet with beyond those limits is due to the intractable elements of juxtaposition and sequence, of the time and space manifolds, which in themselves are incapable of being completely rationalized.
 
Now the ideal of the whole is a plan or scheme in which the constructive principles of the mind are conceived as having untrammeled course and unhindered105 application, and the task of world-building, or rather universe-building, is in idea carried out to completion.
 
The attempt to present an ideal forecast, or outline of the whole of reality, as it would satisfy a mind constituted like ours, an ideal landscape of this sort, is not at all to be confounded with the arrogation of a priori knowledge. A priori knowledge is supposed to be a kind of knowledge, and knowledge of the whole is utterly and confessedly beyond our reach. The phrase a priori, too, is objectionable and unfortunate for two reasons. First, as just said, because it has been supposed to be a kind of knowledge. By some theologians men were supposed to possess a priori knowledge of God.28 Secondly, because the word a priori suggests precedence in time, and our knowledge of the human mind and of its irreducible capacities comes out only in the course of experience. Much that has been called a priori, that is implicit in experience, did not become explicit until after prolonged experience. The Greek thinkers before Aristotle doubtless thought in terms of syllogism, but it was not until Greek science had attained a certain ripeness that Aristotle was able to dissect out the logic which had previously been employed more or less unconsciously.
 
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Instead, therefore, of using the term a priori, which gives rise to the two-fold misapprehension of an a priori knowledge and of temporal precedence, and instead of throwing out the child with the bath, that is, of ignoring the independent part played by our mental constitution in building up experience, and in affording us the conviction of certainty, and of reality, it is highly desirable that a new term be found to take the place of a priori. The term “functional finality” suggests itself to me for this purpose.29
 
My field is ethics. I am entirely desirous of sticking to my own last, that is, dealing with such concepts as the data of my subject force upon me. I do not wish to trespass, or to seem to trespass, on the domain of my neighbors. Hence in dealing with functional finalities I must deal with them primarily as they appear in the field of ethics, that is, in the domain of the actions and reactions of human beings upon one another. Irreducible principia of ethics are the functional finalities, which prescribe rules for such intercourse, or better which create a scheme of ideal intercourse whereby the conduct of men shall be measured and determined.
 
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I must, howe............