ABSTRACT
You will note that in the title selected for this address there is an emphasis on Negro authorship rather than on Negro literature. There is intended a subtlety of implication which reflects, and I hope convincingly to the discerning mind, the spirit of Alain Locke. He was a scholar in philosophy in which he took for his chief concept the theory of values. The doctrine of values, which Thoreau pursued with such dismay to the Puritan skeptics, has always seemed to me the keystone of philosophic thinking, for if the function of philosophy is to estimate and appraise the worth and inevitability of human thought and action, then it is only by determining values can standards be established for the guidance and operation of human conduct and relationships. These standards serve the interests of society, interchangeable as they are with heritage and tradition which are the props of conformity; but it is the individual that counts in the maintenance of standards, for out of reason and emotion, the imagination and intuition, with their interactions of reality and illusion, is compounded the kind of society that prevails in one era or another. I never have been able, though I confess that better Hegelian minds than mine can, to separate aesthetics from philosophy — philosophy to my belief being the science of Truth, if I may use the term science as connoting method rather than formula or finality, and aesthetics being the science of Beauty. Thus we have the two motivating energies, as Henry Adams would say, sustaining the spirit of man.
