Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/327

 HEDONISM AMONG IDEALISTS. 813 arbitrary, which might just as well have been different. Just like the sciences, they are a tissue of adaptations, generated by the struggle of logic, with different degrees of insight, to harmonise situations from moment to moment. I am not saying that life is wisely or rightly determined by these adaptations, but I am saying that it is thoroughly determined, and that to suppose our own choices to be in principle capricious or irrational is to misunderstand our position and the essence of the moral problem. Not only is it scientific- ally wrong to treat the bulk of social tradition as irrational in its genesis, but it shows a lack of insight to treat conduct and modes of life as in essence irrationally determined. The logic of life is imperious, and conduct is guided by the dialectic of its objects in the minutest details. To urge that it is full of error and incoherence is irrelevant ; the point is that the machinery of determination is operative throughout, and is of an assignable nature. The imperfection of its results is itself necessary, and relative to the gaps of our experience. 1 I may further illustrate my point by referring to Mr. McTaggart's evacuating interpretation of " my station and its duties ". (I in no way attribute my views to Mr. Bradley.) The idea of his station and its duties, he main- tains, does not teach a schoolmaster how to deal rightly with a particular boy on a particular occasion. This is something which I am tempted to say that I cannot understand. It must mean, no doubt, that the author reduces the idea of one's station to a general conception of one's place in society as distinct from other places. But surely this is a very pool- idea of one's station. Who says ''schoolmaster" says "a walking theory and practice of education ". This is " what it is to be " a schoolmaster. His conception of his position as distinct, say, from that of the clergyman and the parent, is just the outline of an idea which theory and experience have filled in and adapted in detail, till his position involves for him a distinct conception of his individual duty to each individual boy who is entrusted to his charge, and this again carries with it the reaction of his trained nature upon every occasion and situation which arises. That his action is not in form determined by reflexion or deduction makes,
 * as I urge throughout, no theoretical difference at all. It is

governed in the end by ideas and must be condemned or judged in their light. He is bound to have considered what, under all the conditions, can best be made of each boy so far .as the schoolmaster is concerned ; and this is just his con- 1 Of. p. 307, above.