Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/403

 H. SIDGWICK, Ethics of Green, Spencer, and Martineau. 389 desire them, it is a misconception arising from confusion. Is not this contained in the argument in question ? His view, in a way, is very near akin to Green's. They differ only as abstract and concrete. Both believe in a general good, which the individual takes where he finds it most lolly, without distinction between himself and others. Only Sidgwick has this odd conviction, as I think it, that the good must be cut down to feeling = pleasure ; and so, as seems to some of us, eviscerates it of its content. Sometimes he seems to have a difficulty with egoism and altruism, but really on his own view I do not see why. As to the sum of pleasures and the good in time I would refer to Memoir, cxxxvii., and Nettleship's Remains, i., 335-6. I am prepared to admit that the impossibility of a sum of pleasures has been worked too hard. But the difference between a growth and a, series remains. It seems plain that a series of feelings need not imply any growth of the soul. A few words must suffice for the remainder of the book, which is of less philosophical interest. In dealing with Mr. Herbert Spencer's Data and Principles of Ethics, Sidgwick has little dif- ficulty in showing that his principal contentions either give no ethical guidance or are unsupported by evidence. The former seems to be true of the conception of Absolute Ethics and of the com- promise between Egoism and Altruism. (It is here 'worth noticing how distinctly the author contends that there is at this point a conflict between rational convictions, unless we assume or prove the moral order of the world (p. 188).) The latter would hold good of the allegation that War is the chief anti-ethical influence. So, too, Mr. Herbert Spencer hardly seems to have the philo- sophical conceptions at command which would enable him to get a definite result out of the doctrine which he would like to estab- lish. Hence his theory of the moral End, that it is Quantity of life, taking in width as well as length, remains an undeveloped metaphor. Mr. Sidgwick is able triumphantly to show that its coincidence with Pleasure is assumed by Mr. Spencer, and it is by no means established. And yet this conclusion surely should not be altogether satisfactory to Ethical Hedonism. For Quantity of Life undoubtedly suggests an End which has high claims ; it, or something very like it, commended itself to Spinoza and perhaps to Plato and Aristotle. Mr. Herbert Spencer's ideal of a view of 41 Life " which should give results for practice otherwise than through experience of what things are agreeable, fails no doubt to justify itself in its working, and falls away into an empirical Utilitarianism. But one is not convinced that it has had full justice in interpretation and application ; and it seems as if the notion or intuition that the greatness of Life might somehow be judged on its merits, was better philosophy at bottom than that to which it is here reduced. The mischief is, perhaps, that life has at first been taken as self-preservation in the narrow sense ;