Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/577

 576 CRITICAL NOTICES : growing diversity between the morality of the philosopher and that of the common man, alike in the Stoic wiio erects an impassable barrier between the one thing needful and all other objects of choice, the Epicurean who speaks the words of the pleasure- seeking worldling, and yet lives a life of repose amid intellectual pursuits, the Academic who falls back on mere probability as the basis of duty, the Sceptic who finds in the laws of his country and in his natural instincts a practical guidance, but without scientific value, and the Neo-Platonist, who puts as the highest grade of virtue an assimilation to God, transcending even the scientific goodness of the sage. The pages treating of these sects are excellent both in form and matter. There are points on which we think differently from Mr. Sidgwick. The Anti-hedonism of Speusippus he has exaggerated : he does not bring out the common-place character of the Kn6?iK, and the Antinomian aspects of the Kcnop9ui[*a : he might have noted (p. 71) that Epictetus gives the name of Cynic to the saints of philosophy; and perhaps a little more might have been made of Marcus Aurelius's conception of man as the ' rational and social animal ' and of the mind of the universe as ' social ' also. It is impossible to examine the next sections with the same detail. We have already spoken of the remarks on the contrast between Greek and Christian morality. Mr. Sidgwick follows it up by noting the difference between the philosophic view of vice as due to ignorance and the Christian theology which treated it as due to a perverted will. It is a topic on which generalities are likely to mislead : and one is sometimes tempted to think not merely that the Christian and the Pagan views intermingle, but that the difference between the two sides is sometimes more verbal than real. We cannot stop to note that there is no account of the peculiar ethics of chivalry. Still less can we delay among the English moralists from Hobbes to Bentham, and need only express our admiration of its careful thoroughness. The close of the book fails, we think, to assign to Kant his proper place in the development of English thought. That remarkable disruption in the intellectual history of English ethics which is found in J. S. Mill is only to be explained by the influence, not altogether adequately grasped, of Kant as it filtered through several minds both English and French. It is at least evident that Mill felt the want for a basis to Utilitarianism of a deeper kind than it had yet received. The question of a basis, as distinct from that of the <i.i-!i,nififii nit'il/n, is precisely what Kant set himself to answer : and the importance of this clear enunciation of the basis by Kant is what Mr. Sidgwick, hampered by his old antithesis between Intuitionists and Utilitarians, fails sufficiently to realise. He does not fully bring out the sense in which the rational being is an end to or in himself, and he is perilously near misconception when he ] trusses Kant's words into an assertion "that all rules of duty must admit of being deduced from one general principle" (p. 261).