conditioned by. In man, for example, the intellectual powers certainly
serve our bodily needs. But that is not their principal office;
rather, in them the aims of the entire human being receive expression.
To abolish the distinction of high and low would be to try to
obliterate from our understanding of the world all estimates of the
comparative worth of its parts; and with these estimates its rational
order would also disappear. Such attempts have often been made. In
extreme polytheism there are no superiors among the gods and no
inferiors, and chaos consequently reigns. A similar chaos is projected
into life when, as in the poetry of Walt Whitman, all grades of
importance are stripped from the powers of man and each is ranked as
of equal dignity with every other.

That there is difficulty in applying the distinction, and determining
which function is high and which low, is evident. To fix the purposes
of an object would often be presumptuous. With such perplexities I am
not concerned. I merely wish to point out a perfectly legitimate and
even important signification of the terms high and low, quite apart
from their popular employment as laudatory or depreciative epithets.
It surely is not amiss to call the legibility of a book a higher good
than its shape, size, or weight, though in each of these some quality
of the book is expressed.



IV

A further point of possible misconception in our diagram is the number
of factors represented. As here shown, these are but four. They might
better be forty. The more richly functional a thing or person is, the