Thus stated, then, the problem seems to admit of answer--and along the
line already suggested in our account of economic valuation.[160]
Recognition of the fact that the consciousness of value was experienced
in the survey of a certain purpose on an earlier occasion confirms this
purpose, holding the means, in an economic situation, to their appointed
use and strengthening adherence to the standard in the ethical case.
This recognition serves as stimulus to a reproduction, in memory, of the
cognitive details of the earlier survey, and so in the ideal case to a
more or less complete and recognizably adequate reinstatement of the
earlier valuing attitude, and so to a reinstatement of the consciousness
of value itself. The result is a strengthening of the established
valuation, a more efficacious control of the new end claiming
recognition, and an assured measure of continuity of ethical development
from the old valuation to the new. The function thus assigned to the
consciousness of value finds abundant illustration elsewhere in the
field of emotion. The stated festivals of antiquity commemorative of
regularly recurrent phases of agricultural and pastoral life, as also
the festivals in observance of signal events in the private and
political life of the individual, would appear to find, more or less
distinctly, here their explanation. These festivals must have been
prompted by a more or less conscious recognition of the social value
inherent in the important functions making up the life of the community,
and of the individual citizen as a member of the community and as an
individual. They secured the end of a sustained and enhanced interest in
these normal functions by effecting, through a symbolic reproduction of
these, an intensified and glorified experience of the emotional meaning
normally and inherently belonging to them.[161] In the same way the
rites of the religious cults of Greece, not to mention kindred phenomena
so abundantly to be found in lower civilizations as well as in our own,
served to fortify the individual in a certain consistent and salutary
course of institutional and private life.[162]
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