Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/372

 358 HASTINGS BASHDALL : purpose to indicate in any detail what in my own view is the place of a hedonistic calculus in Moral Philosophy. It is enough to say that I do not regard the promotion of the " greatest quantum of pleasure " as a true or adequate for- mulation of the moral criterion. I believe that many other things most of all Goodness, and, in a lower degree, intel- lectual goods such as knowledge, contemplation of beauty, culture and the like possess a value which is not dependent on the pleasure by which they are normally accompanied, and which very much exceeds the value of the pleasure con- sidered simply as such. At the same time pleasure does appear to me to have intrinsic value. I maintain with Plato, Aristotle, and in fact almost all ethical writers except the Stoics and their imitators of the Greenian School that pleasure or rather (since there are bad pleasures) some pleasure is a good, though not the good. And this asser- tion seems to me to carry with it the implication that ceteris paribus the more pleasure the more good ; ceteris paribus the greater amount of pleasure is to be preferred to the less. I regard it, therefore, as a part of duty, though by no means the whole, to promote as much pleasure as possible ex- cluding, of course, bad pleasures. The promotion of a " greatest quantum of pleasure " or of a " greatest amount of pleasure on the whole " does appear to me a possible object of human desire and human action ; though this aim should be pursued in due subordination to the higher ele- ments in of that evScu/Aovia or total Well-being of Humanity which the good man will regard it as his duty to pursue. These are the propositions which I understand to be denied by the writers I have in mind. It will be well to start with a few specimens of these denials. (1) The late Prof. Green wrote as follows : "A Summum Bonum consisting of a greatest possible sum of pleasure is supposed to be definite and intelligible, because every one knows what pleasure is. But in what sense does every one know it ? If only in the sense that every one can imagine the renewal of some pleasure which he has enjoyed, it may be pointed out that pleasures, not being enjoyable in a sum to say nothing of a greatest possible sum cannot be imagined in a sum either. Though this remark, however, might be to the purpose against a Hedonist, who held that desire could only be excited by imagined pleasure, and yet that a greatest sum of pleasure was an object of desire, it is not to the purpose against those who merely look on the greatest sum of pleasures as the true criterion, without holding that desire is only excited by imagination of pleasure.