Orissers, Mr. L. H. Myers has sketched an interesting psychopath, Cosmo, who quickly got beyond his creator's control.

A unique study of psychopathic personality in literature has come from Italy, Un Uomo Finito. In it Signor Giovanni Papini has given a revelation of his morbid childhood, his raging adolescence, his furious flights from reality, his near-delusions of grandeur which led him to aspire to omnipotence but to fall short of being able to believe himself a god, and his descent into the depths of depression, as these states have never been offered in a single volume the record of a single life. It is admittedly autobiographic and Signor Papini's present piety fits in admirably to the personality.

An open question remains as to whether or not the great advance in the study of morbid psychology witnessed by the present age has been or is being reflected in the fiction of the same period; whether, with the widespread interest in the subject, any of the psychopathic creations of modern novelists surpass in understanding, in presentation or in power of appeal those of Dostoievsky, Ibsen, De Maupassant and other writers of the past century.

It is desirable that we should become saner both as individuals and as nations. That we are becoming less so as individuals the statistics of institutions for the insane would seem to prove; that we are becoming less so as nations needs no proof, but if it did I could readily supply it. We get the Laocoön grasp on disease when we know whence and how it comes. We await this information in regard to insanity. Meanwhile it only throws sand in the gearbox of the available machinery for finding out about it to create literature in which established facts are misrepresented. If we are going to have insanity in fiction, let us have the real thing.

JOSEPH COLLINS.

OF STANDARDS

BY HENRY RUTGERS MARSHALL

THAT tastes in regard to the attribution of beauty are very diverse and variable is a fact that is constantly forced upon our attention. That it has been patent to men of the past, as it is to us, is indicated in the formulation of the proverbial phrase de gustibus non est disputandum. In truth this variability of taste often raises the question whether there are any reliable standards in the realm of æsthetics at all, whether one man's taste is not as well founded as that of any other.

Nevertheless we find a large proportion of those who consider this question seriously convinced that there must exist some really fixed æsthetic standards, if we could but discover them. Indeed even those who hold that dispute in regard to matters of taste is bootless will balk when it is suggested that their position involves the notion that there is no warrant for the belief in the experience of objective beauty apart from the objectified experience of the one who receives the impression.

When we attempt to determine which of these sharply contrasted views is justified we naturally recall the fact that standards exist not only in the field of Beauty, but also in the fields of what we know as the True and the Good, and this in turn reminds us of the very generally accepted grouping of the Beautiful, the True (in the sense of the valid), and the Good (in the sense of the morally good).

We habitually distinguish our experiences as relating (1) to impressions upon us, (2) to our reactions upon these impressions, i.e. our self expressions, and (3) to experiences relating classes 1 and 2, in the realm of thought. It would appear therefore, as I argued in an article in The Philosophical Review for October, 1922, that we naturally accept the triad, the Beautiful, the Good, and the True, as mutually independent, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive, because the Beautiful is the Real of

impressional experience, the Moral Good the Real of reactive experience, i.e., such of our impulses as we would wish to make the persistent guides of conduct; and the True, in the sense of the valid, the Real in the realm of thought, which is concerned with the correlation of our impressional and reactive experiences.

If then this commonly accepted division of the Real is warranted, as it appears to be, the Valid and the Moral Good must display the same general characteristics that are found in the Beautiful; and it would seem probable that the origin and modes of development of our æsthetic standards, which embody such stability or realness as can be maintained in the realm of impression, will find their correspondents in the origins and modes of development of our standards in the realms of the Moral Good and of the Valid. So if we examine the characteristics of our experiences that lead to our acceptance of standards of beauty, we may expect that light may be thrown upon the nature of our appreciation of standards in general.

It may appear to some, however, that such a comparison is not likely to yield fruitful result, for it may be said that the lack of fixity of standards in the realm of beauty contrasts markedly with the fixed nature of standards of validity and of moral goodness; that it is just because of this contrast that our attention is called to the fact that standards of beauty are very varied in men of diverse types, and vary from time to time in the same individual.

But surely this objection does not hold. It is true that on broad lines standards of validity appear to be definitely fixed; for instance, no ordinary man will question that two added to two yield four. And yet careful thought shows us that conceptions of validity held by the barbarian, and indeed by some highly civilized races, differ radically from our own. And even in the world of science, where the rigidity of conceptions of validity are in the main most clearly evidenced, we find very marked changes within relatively short periods of time.

When we turn to the realm of ethics we find fixity of standards still more questionable; a point that becomes very evident when we consider how divergent are the conceptions of morality among peoples differing widely in cultural development. Murder, for

instance, is very generally reprobated throughout the civilized world; but we cannot avoid taking into account the standards in this particular of the Thugs in India, who made murder a matter of religious duty, and of the Maffia in Sicily. And we see furthermore that even among those of our own type no two men of our acquaintance agree with any degree of exactitude as to what is of the essence of moral conduct.

Such an examination of patent facts leads us to see that the most we can say with any assurance is that in the realms of validity and of morality there is a certain limited fixity of standards, but also a considerable vacillation in regard to them; and that the main point formulated in the proverb de gustibus non est disputandum is that the standards of beauty are much less fixed, and much more vacillating, than those of validity and of morality. For it cannot be held that there is no such thing as a relative fixity of æsthetic standards. No competent architect, for instance, designs a column without a capital; which means that all agree that a column must have its capital if it is to impress us as beautiful.

The fact that standards in the realms of validity and of morality are much less vacillating than those in the realms of beauty calls for explanation; but it does not take from the fact that the study of the nature of our standards of beauty and of their mode of development may throw light on the nature of our standards of validity and of morality, and their mode of development.

In turning to this study it may be remarked in general that the mere appreciation of beauty, as of a sunset; the mere experience of an impulse to act that is at once followed by the act; the everyday acceptance of facts as indubitable; involve no experience of, or reference to, standards. Only when we reflect to some degree, and compare the present experience with other experiences of our own, or of other men, do standards emerge.

When, however, together with a given impression, say of a certain musical composition, which involves the sense of beauty, there appear revivals of similar impressions which involved no such sense of beauty, we appreciate the contradictions and choose the former as the one of the opposed experiences which we would maintain. We thus establish æsthetic standards from

moment to moment which are evidently purely individualistic, and these constitute what we speak of as a man's personal taste at a given time.

By a similar process each of us establishes for himself individualistic moral standards, and individualistic standards of validity which determine his beliefs. It is the sum total of a man's individualistic standards of morality and of validity that determine what we call the character of the man in the one case, and that lead us, in the other case, to think of him as clear-headed or foolish.

The most ordinary of men can scarcely fail to note that his personal tastes change from time to time; and if he reflects at all he must perceive that his character is altered, and that the nature of his beliefs changes, in the course of his development. Nevertheless the careless man rests satisfied with his purely individualistic standards in all these fields as they exist from moment to moment: he rests assured that what he admires at any given time is the really beautiful, that what he now thinks morally good is the real moral good, that what he now believes to be true is the really true; and he contents himself with the notion that so far as his present standards differ from those that he formerly held it is because in his past he was blind, as are all who differ from him today.

This attitude yields æsthetic, moral and scientific dogmatism. That it is an entirely unwarranted attitude becomes at once clear when one notes how far the individualistic standards on which it is based are moulded by habitual influences due to special environmental and educational conditions.

That these purely individualistic æsthetic standards govern the thought of all of us to a greater or less degree cannot be questioned; yet it must be agreed that they are in a sense unnatural and in a way morbid. For man is essentially a social being; he is what he is because he is one of a social group; he can never isolate himself completely.

Now we all long for, and search for, that in experience which has stability, which appears to be real; nothing is more disconcerting, or even under certain conditions more alarming, than uncertainty. Naturally then when men note the variability of