Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/234

 220 BEENAED BOSANQUET I to say, it were true that pleasure is the guide to the good and beautiful, then in face of so simple a clue, these elabor- ate sciences could never have grown up. The contradictions which arise in applying that proposition have been the real ferment through which ethic and aesthetic have developed. Now it is quite conceivable that in the body of the sciences these contradictions may be overcome, and the above pro- position victoriously reinstated. But plainly we are going wrong if we do not give some weight to the facts which make the conflict so serious make it occupy, in fact, the whole working area of moral and aesthetic life. It may be said that the radical mistake of the natural man is to pursue his private pleasure and not the pleasure of all ; and that when this is set right, the great contradiction between pleasure and good is in principle overcome. And the idealist Hedonist of to-day of course takes general and not private pleasure as his criterion. But I would point out that in aesthetic there is strictly no such distinction as that between private and general pleasure ; and yet the contradictions which arise in taking pleasure as the clue to excellence are more marked perhaps than they are in ethics. I mean simply that, except with rare and gifted minds, the natural man, in as far as he follows what pleases him, is certain to be wrong. In aesthetic and in ethic alike, let him ever so much set his heart on general and not on private pleasure, the bottom fact is that his only chance of obtaining the fuller satisfaction is to make an effort which is in the direction of the greater difficulty. This effort corresponds to the ap- parent contradiction which the principle of pleasure has to explain away before it can even appear to cover the facts. If quantity 'or pleasure is the guide, why all this effort and explanation ? A natural answer comes : " In the application of our pleasure arithmetic ". I have tried to show that this does not really work. But now I want to make a more positive suggestion on the lines indicated above. I will recapitulate the data as I see them, data presented equally by ethic and aesthetic. Up to a certain point of com- plexity pleasures and pains seem comparable by a direct quantitative process. Yet the natural man, man in as far as he adopts the direct process, is always tending to be wrong in his choice, to be wrong, because he misses satisfac- tion, both by his own admission and by the test of critical experience. And, in our choice, we are all constantly tempted to be the natural man, and so to be wrong. And in this way we daily and hourly miss satisfaction. It is further granted that right choices would and do bring a relatively full satis-