I need hardly add that human and institutional values often conflict, or
that reform consists largely in readjusting them to each other. Nor need
I discuss in detail the familiar process by which human-nature values,
seeking realization through a complex social system, are led to take on
organization and an institutional character, which carries them far away
from human nature and in time calls for a reassertion of the latter,
through the initiative of individuals and small groups. Any one may see
such cycles in the history of the Christian church, or of any other
institution he may prefer to study.
The various human-nature and institutional values differ among
themselves as the phases of the human mind itself differ: that is,
however marked the differences, the values are after all expressions of
a common organic life. There is no clean-cut separation among them and
at times they merge indistinguishably one into another. An organic
mental-social life has for one of its phases an organic system of
values. For example, the æsthetic and moral values may seem quite
unconnected, as in the case of a man with a “fair outside” but a bad
character, and yet we feel that there is something beautiful about
perfect goodness and something good about perfect beauty. It is agreed,
I believe, that the best literature and art are moral, not, perhaps, by
intention, but because the two kinds of value are related and tend to
coincide in their completeness. Alongside of these we may put
truth-value, and say of the three that they are phases of the highest
form of human motive which often become indistinguishable.
The institutional values are also parts of this organic whole, and merge
into the human-nature values, as I have suggested, so that it may be
hard to distinguish between them. An institution, however, seldom or
never corresponds so closely to a phase of human nature that the
institutional values and the immediately human values on the whole
coincide. An idea, in becoming institutional, adapts itself to the whole
traditional structure of society, taking the past upon its shoulders,
and loses much of the breadth and spontaneity of our more immediate
life. There are no institutions that express adequately the inner need
for beauty, truth, righteousness, and religion as human nature requires
them at a given time: no church, for example, ever was or can be wholly
Christian.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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