Page History

...

The passage cited from "Value Theory and Theology" is to be found on p. 113 in Julius Seelye Bixler et  et al., The Nature of Religious Experience (New York: Harper, 1937). The following parallel passage occurs earlier in the same essay, on p. 106: "This principle [sc. of value relativity] does not mean that values must be regarded as relative to desire or to consciousness, that there is nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so. It is generally recognized that objectivity of a sort must be provided for in any value theory, that the 'ought-to-be-ness' of justice, truth and peace does not depend upon the fact that men happen to desire them. But it does not follow that values are independent of structure and process. Such independence can be maintained only by means of a vitiating abstractionism and the denial of the relative standpoint of the observer. There can be no doubt of the absolute claim which truth and justice have upon man, but to abstract them from his nature and to call them valid apart from any being for whom they are valid, to say that they ought to be, rather than that man ought to be truthful and just, is to abandon the realm of experience and to enter into doubtful regions of metaphysical abstraction. There is, however, another and more serious way of refusing to take the principle of relativity seriously in the field of value thinking. It consists of the exaltation of values recognized as relative to human structure into the final values of reality, in the recognition of the human standpoint as the last standpoint which man needs to recognize, or, at least, as the standpoint whence the values of the universe become visible as an integrated system." 

...