Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/386

 372 J. H. MUIRHEAD : test question in any ethical theory and it is disappointing to find it discussed in what strikes one as the most cursory and unsatisfactory section of the book. The drift of the argument may be recalled from the statement that " Ultimately I ought to do this means the leaving of this undone would conflict with my deliberate judgment as to the type of life of which I approve and which I expect of myself ". If all ideals are, equally self -contradictory as the previous chapters have proved and none really more comprehensive as regards its content than another ve can easily understand how a sense of obligation could only grow up in connexion with the formal attitude of the will towards any one of them. But is not some further explanation required on the fundamental point of the reason why self-reproach should attach to the attitude of inconsistency rather than to that of consistency with oneself ? In such a welter of con- tradictions where the cultivation of a robust conscience seems the supreme obligation may not pecca fortiter be equally applicable where the sin is inconsistency as where it is anything else ? The answer of idealism to such a doubt is I suppose that, as in the theoretic so in the practical world, progress and the 'permanent satisfaction ' which the sense of it brings depend upon recognition of the inward pressure of an ideal of systematic self-expression as the deepest thing in life. Mr. Taylor as we have seen does not leave us without a hint of such a system, but he has been at no pains to develop it and thus leaves us without guidance at the critical point of the argument. The concluding chapters on the " Goal of Ethics " and " Beyond Good and Bad " exhibit religion as the necessary refuge from the unsatisfactoriness of the moral life. As however they deduce this consequence not from the contradiction between the individual and social ideal but from the unsatisfactoriness of human life in general, considered as the realisation of a self denned in any terms that do not take account of its relations to an Absolute or all-in- clusive experience, they do not call for notice here. While adding to the reputation of the writer they do not add to the main ethical contention which it has been the object of these notes to criticise. To summarise this criticism. The argument of the book seems to have had its origin in a certain impatience with what appears to the author an ill-timed self-complacency in the idealist philosophy of the time. Since the days of its establishment in English ethics by the Prolegomena and the Ethical Studies many things have happened. Progress has been rapid both in psychology and, thanks mainly to Mr. Bradley himself, in metaphysics. In view of these advances a revision of the current doctrine of self-reali- sation seems to Mr. Taylor to be required. If this were his whole contention there would be little to object to in his criticism. It may very well be true that the phrase ' self-realisation ' is a little threadbare, and that a restatement of the whole position is called