Book Notes and Reviews

Morris, Charles: Varieties of Human Value. [U.  Chicago Press, Pp.  xv + 209. $5.00].

The research method used in the investigations reported in this book is self-rating. The subjects were college students, 2846 from the United States and 1588 from China, Japan, India, Norway and Canada. They were asked to indicate their degrees of liking for, and dislike of, 13 “ways of life”. They were asked to indicate their attitude toward “the kind of life you personally would like to live”, and not the way of life actually lived or considered prudent in view of social pressures. The scale consisted of seven degrees; degree 4 indicating indifference, degree 1 standing for “I dislike it very much” and degree 7 for “I like it very much”; the remaining four degrees indicating milder degrees of liking and dislike. The most valuable part of this book is probably the description of the 13 ways which seem to include all the attitudes toward life developed by the great traditional religions and philosophical-ethical systems. They can be classified according to the degree to which they express these three basic ancient Greek attitudes: (1) dionysian or its reverse, (2) promethean or its reverse, (3) contemplative and detached or its reverse. The 1st attitude is one of relaxed receptiveness with stress on “being” and “letting things happen”. The 2nd is marked by active control of environment with stress on “doing” and “making things happen.” The 3rd displays detachment with stress on “perceiving”, self-awareness, and “watching things happen”.

It is one thing to inventorize the ways of life and another to measure the preference for them. If one realizes that the rather lengthy paragraphs which describe the ways cannot evoke the same associations in even the majority of readers, that among many of the ways there are slight differences which only a very careful reading can detect, that many people do not actually know what they really like, that the rating scale is not interpreted in the same w