Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/254

 238 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

To seek it, just as to do only what is duty, is to try to shake hands with an intangible, invisible, wholly insensible spirit. Pleasure, then, and duty, although the pertinent ideals of radi- calism and conservatism, are evidently only pure principles or spirits of life; they are not, and as ideals they cannot be, pro- grams for life. The hedonism and the rigorism, which advocate them, have no choice but to say, as they defend their standpoints : "We mean not the program, but the principle; not the letter, which is apparently associated with our life, but the spirit." "Not the letter, but the spirit," has ever been the last fortress, the inner citadel, of extra-naturalism in any form.

And not only do we need here to observe that duty and pleasure are extra-natural, and that they both have the merely formal character of abstract principles; but also we need to remind ourselves that they are opposed, and that accordingly they do but repeat or continue the conflict out of which the ethi- cal question, that one or the other of them is supposed to answer, has sprung. We need to remind ourselves of this fact of their opposition, because, taken in connection with their extra- naturalism and their purely formal character, it shows, as per- haps nothing else could, the real significance of their relation to the interests of the conflicting old and new. It shows, in a word, that they afford no real settlement of the ethical problem. Can what is extra-natural, formal, and never without an opponent having equal demands, ever really answer such a practical ques- tion as that of ethics? What ought man to do? Can the con- clusive solution of any problem come from either one of the parties to the conflict that is, or that makes, the problem ?

Evidently, in the genesis of ethical theory, rigorism and hedonism alike belong to the class of doctrines, or intellectual formulations, commonly known as apologetics. They are char- acteristically ex parte ; they are one-sided, then, and so dogmatic ; they are extra-naturalistic. Their opposition, too, makes them apologetic or on the defensive. Perhaps all formulations of doctrine, particularly of philosophical doctrine, arising no doubt under similar or even under the same conditions, are apologetic on all these counts; but, be this as it may, with the general