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 348 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

in this art and to become a kind of professor of it. But the more of an adept he became in this moral arithmetic, the further he seemed to be from the promised happiness. Measuring all objects of pursuit by their capacity to give positive pleasure, the interest in the objects themselves seemed to evaporate and life to appear sordid and empty. He has described the period of moral depression which supervened upon this discovery in one of the most interesting passages in philosophical biography. He only finally succeeded in escaping from it by casting aside the pleasure-calculus as a guide to happiness, and throwing himself into the concrete interests of life. He explained his experience as an instance of what he called the paradox of Hedonism : the paradox, namely, that to obtain happiness you must cease to aim at it as an end, "to get it you must forget it." The explanation sufficed to save the credit of the school among the followers of Mill, but it could not be expected that it would satisfy anyone else. The true explanation, of course, is that pleasure is only one element in well-being, and only by a confusion could be mis- taken for the whole of it. The idea that it was the whole was an abstract idea in the sense for which I have contended and it revealed its abstractness the moment that a consistent attempt was made to apply it to practice, by refusing to work at all.

The bearing of these examples on the present argument is plain. If in order to be practical in the best sense ideas must be concrete, and if concrete ideas cannot, as a rule, be had with- out serious intellectual effort, there is at least a presumption in favor of an institution one of whose professed objects is to offer a hand to anyone who is willing to make the effort required.

III.

I have tried to establish a general presumption in favor of the " abstract " study of ethics. But this is not all that may be said : it may be pleaded also that rising out of the special character of the time in which we live there is at present a special need for such a study.

Our age, we are often told, is an age of transition. This