ABSTRACT
The fact of "internal responsibility" is a good basis for the ethical concept Df the person; we find here a conjunction of experiences and acts which indicates both a "substantial bearer" (which we shall not further investigate here) and also a constant, as it were, "intra-substantial" order of gradations, in which less emphatic layers are laid around an ethical kernel and their nature determined, albeit indefinitely, by it. "Personality" in the ethical sense, then, means this real individual and distinct "something" with its own particular nature, which has the natural potential to be the bearer of a set of value-nuances with their own particular emphases, indeed of a unique value and significance impossible to grasp in general terms. (For brevity's sake we shall also use the word "person", although it usually has more of a non-ethical colouring; "personality" also has alien connotations, such as social recognition, and so on.) The concept of "person" gets its ethical sense not from value alone, not as a unit of reason and morality, as though it were an abstract point in moral space, and still less as a simple individual essence, after the Romantics, but preeminently as a real graded unity.
