Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/186

 174 HENEY SIDGWICK: I should have expected that man's pursuit of perfection would be traced to some combination of natural desires modified by self-consciousness. But the account of the moral ideal, which the author proceeds to give in Book iii., does not correspond to this expectation : the impulse of the spirit to seek " moral good " is rather represented as being in profound contrast and anta- gonism to the impulses of the animal soul. We are told that though self-satisfaction is continually sought by moral agents in the realisation of the objects of particular desires due to the conditions under which the self-conscious subject exists in the human organism it cannot be really found there. " The conditions of the animal soul, ' servile to every skiey influence,' no sooner sated than wanting, are such that the self-determining subject cannot be conscious of them as conditions to which it is subject . . . without seeking some satisfaction of itself that shall be independent of these conditions." Accordingly though " good " is defined as /' that which satisfies some desire," " moral good " or the " true good " is defined as "an end in which the effort of a moral agent may really find rest " (p. 179) or, as Green elsewhere expresses it, "an abiding satisfaction of an abiding self" (p. 250). That is, this appears to be Green's view on the whole, though there is a certain ambiguity or hesitation in his language. In some passages he rather confuses the reader by apparently using " good " to denote the object in which self-satisfaction is sought, whether or not it is really found in it. Thus he speaks (p. 99) of a moral agent presenting to himself a certain idea of himself as an " idea of which the realisation forms " not seems " for the time his good ". So again, p. 166 " The man who calmly faces a life of suffer- ing in the fulfilment of what he conceives to be his mission could not bear to do otherwise. So to live is his good " ; where the context shows that such a man is not therefore conceived to find satisfaction in so living. But supposing we understand "good" in such passages to mean 'apparent' or ' anticipated ' good, another difficulty remains. Green holds, of course, that particular desires are continually being satisfied ; and since he speaks of the moral agent as " identi- fying itself" with such desires (or their objects) and even speaks of a " particular se//-satisfaction " to be gained in attaining one of these objects (p. 108), I do not see how he can consistently deny that the good even of a moral agent is temporarily gained in such " particular self-satisfactions ". Still, the passages in which such denial is explicitly or irn-