Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/274

 260 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

with the judge. No act of man is pure : all acts are tarnished in the common clay of human joy. None but a mad man could act without getting pleasure or pain from his act. It is a uni- versal quality which attends all action. But it is not the ethical standard, and cannot be the ethical standard, unless the whole of experience appears within it. Nothing can test consciousness but consciousness itself; consciousness organized, conscious- ness functioning. Pleasure is one of the elements of reality, but not that full reality which experience offers. It is vain to attempt to measure the whole by one of its parts, unless the whole functions through the part and this functioning is constant. Pleasure is a standard of action, but it will not work. To tell the carpenter to get the most pleasure for humanity is to give him an impossible rule ; for it involves endless calculations for the making of which neither minds nor tools have as yet been perfected. At a time when physics, dealing with a compara- tively simple subject-matter by means of innumerable tools and laboratory inventions, has barely succeeded in reducing its phe- nomena to mathematical expression ; when chemistry, with all its delicacy of tests and tools, has just begun to enter its facts in such formulae, is it not something akin to sheer folly to offer to men mathematical criteria for all the world of human relations, and expect them to use them? For facts the most complex, for a field the least explored, without methods and without tools, the delicate shadings of more-or-less in pleasure become impos- sible and useless guides. Undoubtedly they are there, and if we could discover their variations, they might serve us as the measure of all our experience ; for in any group of three con- stants any one of them may measure the variations of the whole group. When the law of pleasure's constancy in the group- experience shall have been discovered, then will pleasure be a standard ; but not the standard of action, for this discovery will involve the discovery of the constancy of the other aspects of the group, each of which will then adequately state the whole. To set up pleasure as the standard before that time is analogous to the action of a physician who, believing the mind and body are functions, each of the other, should immediately conclude