ABSTRACT
The tendency and character of those forces which cause people actions and the phenomena of their consciousness are only known to by their effects as their behaviour, and by their affects as our feelings. It is the natural and inevitable result of the operation of the conative impulses of life. Whatever the nature of that tendency which constitutes the quality of the impulses of life, it is clear that it is not concerned chiefly with the individual. The whole activity of life consists in reaction to the affective values determined by its conative disposition; and among those values themselves there exist relations, a respective value of values, a hierarchical order of evolutionary rank, which is intuitively known—albeit frequently confounded with, and obscured by, traditional pseudo-values. ‘Higher’ means the closer approximation of the conative tendency that determines all activities to its intrinsic goal.
