But we have to note that such value-standards are only presumptive.
Their status depends, on one hand, upon the extent in which the
present situation is like the past. In a progressive or rapidly
altering social life, the presumption of identical present value is
weakened. And while it would be foolish not to avail one's self of the
assistance in present valuations of the valuables established in other
situations, we have to remember that habit operates to make us
overlook differences and presume identity where it does not exist--to
the misleading of judgment. On the other hand, the contributory worth
of past determinations of value is dependent upon the extent in which
_they_ were critically made; especially upon the extent in which the
consequences brought about through acting upon them have been
carefully noted. In other words, the presumptive force of a past value
in present judgment depends upon the pains taken with its
verification.
In any case, so far as judgment takes place (instead of the
reminiscence of a prior good operating as a direct stimulus to present
action) all valuation is in some degree a revaluation. Nietzsche would
probably not have made so much of a sensation, but he would have been
within the limits of wisdom, if he had confined himself to the
assertion that all judgment, in the degree in which it is critically
intelligent, is a transvaluation of prior values. I cannot escape
recognition that any allusion to modification or transformation of an
object through judgment arouses partisan suspicion and hostility. To
many it appears to be a survival of an idealistic epistemology. But I
see only three alternatives. Either there are no practical
judgments--as judgments they are wholly illusory; or the future is
bound to be but a repetition of the past or a reproduction of
something eternally existent in some transcendent realm (which is the
same thing logically),[89] or the object of a practical judgment is
some change, some alteration, to be brought about in the given, the
nature of the change depending upon the judgment and yet constituting
its subject-matter. Unless the epistemological realist accepts one of
the two first alternatives, he seems bound, in accepting the third, to
admit not merely that practical judgments make a difference in things
as an after-effect (this he seems ready enough to admit), but that the
import and validity of judgments is a matter of the difference thus
made. One may, of course, hold that this is just what marks the
distinction of the practical judgment from the scientific judgment.
But one who admits this fact as respects a practical judgment can no
longer claim that it is fatal to the very idea of judgment to suppose
that its proper object is some difference to be brought about in
things, and that the truth of the judgment is constituted by the
differences in consequences actually made. And a logical realist who
takes seriously the notion that moral good is a fulfilment of an
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