Page:Ethical Studies (reprint 1911).djvu/119

 On either supposition, then, these preferable pleasures found no ‘ought’ in the moral sense: you have them or you have them not; you like them or you do not like them; you know them or you do not know them; and there is an end of it. If A, B, and C call D immoral, D may return the epithet, and if he likes to say ‘ignorance is morality’ or to make any other assertion whatever, he can do it, as it appears to me, on precisely the same ground as A, B, and C have for their assertions, viz. no ground at all but likes and dislikes.

And here I think we might leave the matter; but, having gone so far, we may as well go a little further. Not only has moral obligation nothing in Mr. Mill’s theory to which it can attach itself save the likes or dislikes of one or more individuals, but in the end it is itself nothing more than a similar feeling.

‘The ultimate sanction of all morality’ is ‘a subjective feeling in our own minds’ (p. 41), and the ‘moral faculty’ is ‘susceptible by a sufficient use of the external sanctions, and of the force of early impressions, of being cultivated in almost any direction; so that there is hardly anything so absurd or so mischievous that it