Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/192

 180 HENEY SIDGWICK: distinction between the desirer's own individuality and that of other persons, I presume that we must maintain this dis- tinction in interpreting the account above given of " all desire" ; and therefore that the "better state of myself" which I necessarily seek cannot be the better state of any other person as such. But if so, we must know exactly how the one comes to be identified or indissolubly connected with the other under the comprehensive notion of the " bettering of man " or " humanity " ; by what logical process we pass from the form of unqualified egoism under which the true end of the moral agent is represented to us on one page, to he unmediated universalism which we find suddenly sub- stituted for it on another. I admit, of course, that the Divine Spirit, so far as it can be rightly conceived to aim at the realisation or reproduction of itself in men, must be con- ceived as aiming at its realisation in " persons," not in " this person," in humanity, not in me ; but this only brings out more forcibly the difference that has to be bridged over be- tween the aim of my one indivisible conscious self at its own satisfaction, and this aim of the Divine Spirit at a satisfac- tion or realisation which may just as well be attained in anyone else as in me. The mere fact that I am aware of myself as a self-distinguishing consciousness and attribute a similar consciousness to other men, does not necessarily make me regard their good as my own ; some rational % transition is still needed between the recognition of them as ends to themselves, and the recognition of them as ends to myself. Can this transition be obtained by dwelling on the essential sociality of men, the universal or normal implication, through sympathy, of each one's interest or good with the interests of some others according to the plain man's conception of ' interest ' no less than the philosopher's ? In some parts of his discussion (e.g., in Book hi., ch. 3) Green seems to rely to some extent on this line of reasoning, with which the looser optimism of eighteenth-century moralists appears to Jiave been often entirely satisfied ; but I think that an exact consideration of it will show its inadequacy to establish the required conclusion. For granting all that is claimed, it only proves that I cannot realise good for myself without promoting the good of others in some degree ; it does not show that my own good is in any sense identical with the ^ood of others who are to live after me, so that it will " abide " in another form when my individual existence has terminated. And even if we give up the characteristic of " permanence " and merely consider whether my good during life can be identified with the good of humanity at large, I