Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/119

 106 CRITICAL NOTICES : For there can be no "obligation " to do that which, by the mere fact of its not being done, is shown, according to the doctrine of necessity, to have been impossible. Determinism reduces all moral questions to questions of selecting the right means for attaining ends fixed by personal taste. The end is not necessarily egoistic ; but if happiness is the only conceivable end, man has, so to speak, " the right to egoism ". The sentiment of altruism can only be appealed to so far as it exists ; and it can never acquire the character of an imperative. Eudsemonists, therefore, for the most part, aim at producing by education artificial asso- ciations of ideas of the good of society with ideas of personal good. This supposes control of public opinion and of the machinery of education by those in whom the idea of good hap- pens to have taken the altruistic form ; and this control must be exercised with a view to forming all minds according to a single type. The eudaemonist morality of " benevolence " or " senti- ment " thus lends itself naturally to theories of political and social despotism. And that the putting of some "good," however elevated, in place of the conceptions of duty and right, has actually had such theories for its consequence, is seen in the history of speculations that make the idea of good supreme, from Plato's Eepublic to the political system of Comte. J. S. Mill per- ceived this tendency of ''benevolent utilitarianism" and tried to avoid it, but without success, so far as he argues from his own theoretical point of view. He perceived also the unsatisfactoriness of a morality that depends on artificial associations dissoluble by analysis. In Mr. Spencer's ethical doctrine there is a falling back on the idea of an inevitable progress of the human race, as the means of bringing about a spontaneity of benevolent senti- ment ; but in the meantime there is no foundation for really ethical " injunction ". As in other utilitarian systems, when there is no question of enforced obedience to external standards all depends ultimately on personal taste. It is the same with the morality of pessimism. Schopenhauer, for example, who makes "pity" take the place of the "sympathy" of optimistic utilitari- anism, entirely rejects the idea of duty. Essentially, contempo- rary optimism and pessimism are at one as to the ethical stan- dard. The opposite ethical doctrine is to be found in the Stoics and Spinoza ; but it received for the first time perfectly accurate expression in Kant's Practical Reason. The idea of duty is im- plicit in Stoicism as " conformity to the order of the universe " ; that of liberty as "independence of external things". On the one side, however, there is as yet no true idea of obligation, and on the other side there is theoretical determinism. So far as Kant retains the idea of absolute determinism in the phenomenal world there is an inconsequence in his system also ; but in his ethical formula, the categorical imperative, he has corrected both the principal defects of Stoicism. Kant's great achievement was to make ethics independent of every system of metaphysics. In