In the recent elaborate researches in sociological ethics of Hobhouse and Westermarck[255] we read, for example, of facts like the gradual “blunting of the edges of barbarian ideas,” and the recognition of the “principal moral obligations” in the early oriental civilizations, the existence of the “doctrine of forgiveness,” and of “disinterested retributive kindly emotion,” the acceptance and redistribution by Confucius of the traditional standards of Chinese ethics, the “transformation” by the Hebrew prophets of the “law of a barbarous people into the spiritual worship of one God,” of a God of “social justice,” of “mercy,” and finally of “love.” Both these writers, in view of such facts and of other facts of a kindred nature, arrive at the conclusion that the supreme authority assigned to the moral law is not altogether an illusion, that there is after all the “_great permanent fact of the moral consciousness persisting through all stages of development_, that whether we believe or disbelieve in God, or religion, or nature, or what not, there remain for all of us certain things to do which affect us with a greater or less degree of mental discomfort.” Now as we think of it, there is something that Pragmatism fails to see in respect of this undoubted transformation of the merely physical basis of our life that takes place, or that has taken place, in the moral life of humanity. While firmly holding in its moral philosophy (we can see this in the typical work of Dewey and Tufts[256]) to its far-reaching principle that our entire intellectual life has been worked out in the closest kind of relation to our practical needs, Pragmatism has nevertheless failed to see that in the highest reaches of our active life the controlling ideas (“justice,” “humanity,” “courage,” and so on) have a value independently of any consequences other than those of their realization in the purposes and in the dispositions of men. Or, more definitely, it is just because moral ideas, like any ideas, cannot fail to work themselves out into our actions and into our very dispositions and character, that it becomes of the utmost importance to conceive of the truth they embody as having a value above all consequences and above all ordinary utility. If sought ever and always for its own sake, the highest kind of truth and insight, the truth that we apprehend in our highest intuitions and in our highest efforts, will inevitably tend to the creation of a realm of “value,” a realm of personal worth and activity that we cannot but regard as the highest reality,[257] or the highest plane of experience of which we are conscious. In this thought, then, in the thought of the reality of the life and work of human beings who have given all for truth and goodness and love, there is surely at least a partial clue to the value of the great idea after which Pragmatism is blindly groping in its contention of the importance even to metaphysics of the notion of our human, “purposive” activity.