VALUE, THEORY OF. Until recently there has been no general theory of value. Value has long been a fundamental notion of political economy and various theories of its nature have been developed, but it is only in the last decades that it has been uni versally recognized as one of the great philosophical topics. Its discovery has been held by some to be "the greatest philosophical achievement of the 19th century," and its development as a special field of psychological and philosophical study has gone so far that a special name has been created for it, namely Axiology.
The development of such a theory requires the considera tion of the following problems : What is the nature of values? (definition) (2) What are the fundamental values and how are they to be classified? (3) How may we determine the relative values of things and what is the ultimate standard of value? (4) Are values merely subjective, satisfying merely subjective desires, or are they objective, in some sense other than objects of desire, and giving some law or norm to desire? (5) What is the relation of values to things or of value to existence and reality? The History of the Value Notion.—A brief sketch of the history of the idea of value in philosophy will help to make clear the meaning of these problems. The Greeks did not have the term value as now understood, but in the light of subsequent develop ments we may see that they had the notion, and were aware of these problems. Plato conceived the good or value as the cul mination of the worlc of ideas and the constructive principle of the world which organizes all its forms or laws. Aristotle, in pro posing to view all things teleologically, and to make the relation of a thing to its end or value essential to its very being, affirmed, not only the objective reality of value qualities, but also their suprem acy over all the other attributes of things. Neither Plato nor Aris totle developed this line of reflection fully, nor did succeeding phil osophers investigate the subtle and perplexing problems involved in it. Plato himself called this the most difficult question of all science. Nevertheless, the general principle enunciated by Greek philosophy continued to be the rule throughout the middle ages, and the objectivity of value the key to all their thinking.
The modern developments of the subject proceed directly from Kant who here, as elsewhere, represents a crisis in philosophic thought. The classical conception of the objectivity of the good
or value had been abandoned by modern empirical thought. If the so-called "secondary" qualities, such as colour, taste, sound, etc. are made dependent upon the percipient subject, all the more must the "tertiary" qualities, such as beauty, goodness, etc. be made dependent upon human desire and feeling. This extru sion of all values from the objective world seemed to Kant to be the necessary consequence of the assumptions of "science." But he could not accept it as the whole story of values. By a well known line of reasoning which cannot be repeated here, he restored their objectivity in a new form. Though not "existent" in the same sense as physical things, their reality must be postulated and acknowledged, if life and action are to be possible. They have, in his terms, "validity" and "practical reality." With this an entirely new line of thought was set in motion, raising new problems of fact and value, value and validity, value and existence. A large part of modern axiology or general theory of value has developed under the inspiration of Neo-Kantianism. But it is to R. H. Lotze (1817-81) more than any other man perhaps except Nietzsche, that the popularity of the term value is due, and certainly he more than any other is responsible for the prevalence of the idea of value as an ultimate notion in philosophy. Albrecht Ritschl 2 89), Lotze's theological colleague at GOttingen, made the value notion central in the discussions of religion and theology and fur nished modernist tendencies in theology with a large part of their inspiration and much of their terminology. He agrees with Kant that the objects of religion are objects of faith as distinct from knowledge in the scientific sense, but he develops much further the notion that they are matters of value judgment as distinct from theoretical judgment, although equally capable of certainty and validity. It is mainly to Ritschl that is due the current distinction between judgments of value and judgments of fact, and the subordination of judgments of fact to judgments of value. From Ritschl's position it was easy to pass to that of W. Windelband (1848-1915) who, together with H. Rickert and Hugo Miinsterberg (1863-1916) developed the Neo-Kantian axiology to which reference has been made.