Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/321

 HEDONISM AMONG IDEALISTS. 307 to fill up the outline of thought, is a positive loss if it debars us from recognising the working of the idea within the tissue of experience. We know that its work will be imperfect, because our experience is imperfect. But that is no reason against its being definite and right as far as it goes. The shape it takes would not do for ultimate reality ; but the shape it takes for ultimate reality will not do for the given stage of experience. Thus in science Biology or Chemistry may be likened to growing forms, whose general life principle, when taken out in the abstract, becomes the Uniformity of Nature. 1 But so taken out in the abstract, though interest- ing for Logic and Philosophy, it is useless to the sciences. They are it, in shapes dictated by experience at every moment, but when it is separated from these they cannot use it. So with the moral life. Its shape at any moment is the idea of perfection working in experience down to that moment, as a striving after the completest harmony possible under all the conditions, in other words after what we really want. Taken out and pushed home in the abstract, it becomes useless, for this particular work. The forms which it had generated in the matter of experience have then been cancelled as inade- quate to the whole, and therefore all links are cut between Perfection and human life. But they were not inadequate to the part ; on the contrary, the effort which generated them is the same as, and an essential part of, that which as an anticipatio natures, regarding only the central lines of experience, leads to the abstract conception of ultimate reality. The "tacking" of Dialectic makes no difference to this adequacy. Mistakes may be necessary; but they are necessary only as efforts after harmony, and, as the strivings of reason, are relatively good. Indeed, everything but ultimate reality as such may be treated as a mistake. But there are mistakes and mistakes. Our object is to make only that mistake which our whole experience cannot help us to avoid. The point may be put more simply by saying that we test courses of action not by the abstract metaphysical idea of the supreme good, but by the tests by which that idea itself is obtained and which therefore form the rule of the entire process of practical experience the dialectic of desire. The essence of the test at every point is the resolution of contradictions. Our action is precisely parallel to that by which scientific theories are remodelled and adapted; and, 1 Ultimately, of course, the Absolute. But I take it at a stage when the distinction of Knowledge and Practice still persists.