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. Ought is the feeling of obligation, and ‘when the feeling ceases the obligation ceases.’ The Utilitarian believes on psychological grounds that pleasure is the sole desirable: he believes on the strength of his natural and moral instincts that he must live for others: he puts the two together, and concludes that the pleasure of others is what he has to live for. This is not a good theoretical deduction, but it is the generation of the Utilitarian monster, and of that we must say that its heart is in the right place, but the brain is wanting.

Its heart, its ‘natural sentiment,’ does tell it that its substance is one with the substance of its fellows; that in itself and by itself it is not itself at all, and has no validity except as a violent and futile attempt at abstraction. And yet if we deny that an universal can be more than ‘an idea,’ if we are sure that the merely individual and the real are one and the same, and in particular that the self is exclusive of other selves, and is in this sense a mere individual; and if further, for morality at all events, we can not do without something that is universal, something which is wider and stronger than this or that self—then here, as in all other