professional or business group is more representative of what the individual considers to be a just social policy, to which social group shall he give his major loyalty in case there is a conflict? An attorney is employed to institute civil suit to recover from another member of the Bar an amount of money procured by the latter from the client by means of forgeries committed by the defendant. The client instructs the new attorney not to inform the District Attorney of the forgeries and not to lay any complaint before any bar association against the offending attorney, nor to take any steps against the offending attorney except civil proceedings to recover the amount of which he has been defrauded. Is the new attorney under any professional duty to disclose the offense? Lawyers, according to their code of ethics, "should expose without fear or favor before the proper tribunals corrupt or dishonest conduct in the profession," and are specifically warned in case perjury has been committed to "bring the matter to the knowledge of the prosecuting authorities." But it is generally accepted among American lawyers that "confidential communications from a client should not be disclosed," and they are "privileged" at law. In Galsworthy's Loyalties, the lawyer, learning during the course of the trial that his client is unquestionably guilty, lays the facts before the judge and refuses to go on with the case. The doctor is in a somewhat similar position when approached by the prospective spouse of one of his patients and asked regarding the health and purity of the latter. What should the doctor do? His primary professional interest coincides with the public interest in conserving the public health, especially of the future generation. The dignity and worth of his profession consist partly in the fact that the profession is constantly committing professional suicide. But the doctor is also interested in safeguarding the confidential knowledge obtained by at least an implied pledge of fidelity when it was first disclosed. If professional men violate the confidences placed in them, then clients and patients will cease to be frank with doctor, lawyer, priest, or banker. Only by encouraging frankness can the professional man learn the facts of a case, and only so can he render proper professional services. The social implications extend to the ministrations of the Catholic Church, to the administration of juvenile courts, to the stabilization of our whole financial structure, and to the intimacies of family life. Those who believe that their own social groups or institutions represent ideals superior to those of the state, will insist that, when a real conflict arises between their own group ideals and the laws, their loyalty must be given to the former. This is the explanation of the conscientious objector and of the abolitionist; it explains in part the tax-dodger and the business man who refuses to divulge his trade knowledge to governmental employees. And it is this same principle that justifies the insistence of professional men on their right to keep professional secrets inviolate, a principle which asserts that there are other groups besides the state which can and should determine social conduct. So long as these various social agencies are merely complementary to each other, no one can object to their distributing among themselves their social functions. But when these various interests conflict, then there arise moral and ethical problems such as we have just discussed. This problem becomes difficult when a large social group like a nation finds itself confronted by the interests of humanity represented in a Church or a League of Nations. And in the case of 'confidential communications,' the problem is no less difficult, although the state or nation may be confronted by only a small professional or business group. It is this field of ethical behavior which constitutes the most recent objective offered to scientific social analysis. Not only are the more complicated problems of social pluralism and evaluation presented to the social philosopher in concrete form, but there are also those peculiar specifications worked out by each social group in the form of codes of ethics and practice cases, business methods and efforts at standardization of products which characterized Medieval life. Whether history is repeating itself may well concern the student of social relations. That the Medieval situation could exactly repeat itself after several intervening centuries of national supremacy and legal uniformity, would involve a major historical fallacy. The opportunity for employing the historical-comparative method is, however, ap parent. The emphasis placed by business and professional groups on voluntary coöperation offers material alike to morals, the domain of the unenforceable, and ethics, the realm of permanent social expediency. The methodological problems involved are as rich as the content of functional activities is varied. What the human mind has been about all this while becomes a matter of interesting conjecture. Certainly Greek thought is characterized by its emphasis on secular explanation and analytical clarity. This followed in pleasant contrast with the previous supernatural concepts employed by primitive man to solve what he regarded as miracles or mysteries. Was this Greek thought the result of a catching-up of human ingenuity with the complexities of his natural environment? Were the dreams and fantasies of previous peoples the incoherent mental discharges of an organism that had been swamped by the growing heterogeneity of a universe from which the physical mists had gradually disappeared? And did the growing social complexities that followed upon the comparatively simple Greek life again prove too much for human mental capacity? The resort of Medieval thinkers to a transcendent heaven and to supernatural powers for explanations and controls proved as ineffective as the social pluralism involved in Genosse and guild was inadequate in comparison with nationalism and law. Have these latter in turn outrun their course, and is the human mind again in modern times catching up with the growing complexities of the natural and social world, complexities which twice before outstripped its capacities? If so, we are on the verge of a secularization of thought which may repeat the Age of Pericles and that of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. We may yet again bring heaven down to earth and once more assert a humanism in our conquest of nature and in an intelligent form of social engineering The conscious employment of social as well as natural agencies for enhancing the welfare and worth and dignity of the human being is a method which should not be neglected if we really have the opportunity of employing it. The individual will thereby come to have an enhanced value. Not only will there remain to him those properties of his physical essence which have always been regarded as his private self. Nor will there be any detraction from that other relatively constant value, his moral personality and character. But to these and to the functional and variable factors now secured and facilitated by law and government, there are to be addedor integrated—those vocational and avocational interests which contribute to the richness of the pattern of individuality, especially if they be objectified and intensified in social institutions, corporations, or trade and professional associations. That is, if a person be regarded as in part the sum total of such interests as he has, if a man comes to himself in concrete social activities, then the conscious selection of such professional and business groups as will serve instrumentally to secure his social capacities, will conserve to the great society its necessary and most desirable constituents. THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA. C. F. TAEUSCH. DR. DISCUSSION DR. BROAD ON PERCEPTION AND MATTER. R. BROAD'S main conclusions from his analysis of senseperception are: (a) "we may believe that there are relatively permanent objects which literally have shape, size and position; which stand in literal spatial and temporal relations to each other; and which literally move about in Space; (b) a single physical object may manifest itself at the same time in the same or in different ways to a number of minds animating bodies in various places; (c) we can determine with high probability the shape, size, and position of the physical object which manifests itself in this situation; (d) we may not believe that the objective constituents of perceptual situations are literally spatio-temporal parts of the physical objects which we are said to be perceiving in those situations." In the course of his detailed arguments, however, the final negative conclusion (d) precedes the others; and I shall endeavor to show: (1) that he adduces no evidence whatever for this conclusion, but that it is asserted purely dogmatically and is therefore devoid of logical value; (2) on the other hand, as soon as this negative position is (for argument's sake) conceded, then it becomes altogether impossible to attain the positive conclusions (a, b, c). Since these plainly constitute a realism, though of a highly attenuated type, it follows that his arguments actually involve either noumenalism or subjectivism. 1. All that the "analysis of perceptual situations" really yields is the theoretical distinction between (a) "the objective constituent of the perceptual situation" and (B) "the physical object." Now this distinction is of undeniably high value; but it is obviously quite insufficient in itself to justify any assertion that (a) and (8), while thus distinguishable, can never be perceived to be existentially identical with each other. Yet Mr. Broad immediately proceeds to maintain that "no amount of perceptual verification can prove that the objective constituent of a perceptual situation is a part of a physical object of a certain specified kind." 2 But this, in the absence 1 The Mind and its Place in Nature, pp. 218, 219. Belief is concerned in each of these instances, as with the remaining subordinate points; cf. further p. 566 below. 2 Op. cit., p. 155. |