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 GREEN'S ETHICS. 181 still fail to see how this identification can be justified by anything that we know of the essential sociality of ordinary human beings. The " better state of himself" as conceived even by a voluptuary, who aims at dining well, is a social state : his dinner must be a convivial dinner if it is to be good ; but it does not follow that he contemplates the waiters who hand round the dishes as ends-in-themselves or has any r interest in future good dinners of which he will not partake. This is a coarse illustration ; but the proposition that it illus- trates seems to me equally, if less palpably, time of all the ordinary exercises and functions of cultivated social existence : the mere fact that I am a social being, that my life is meager and starved if I do not enlarge it by sympathy, and live the life of the community of which I am a member, does not* necessarily constitute the good of humanity my good : it brings me a certain way towards this, but it has not neces- sarily any force or tendency to carry me the rest of the way. Granting that '' to any one actuated by it the idea of perfec- tion for himself will involve the idea of a perfection for all other beings, so far as he finds the thought of their being perfect necessary to his own satisfaction," it remains true that to most persons the dissatisfaction caused by the idea of the imperfection of other beings, not connected with them by some special bond of sympathy, is at any rate an evil very faintly perceptible ; and the question why in this case they should sacrifice any material part of their own good or per-' fection to avoid it remains unanswered. I shall be told, perhaps, that the true good of man is so constituted that no competition can possibly arise between the good of one individual and the good of any other. And, doubtless, Green often afiirms with sufficient distinctness that " the idea of a true good does not admit of the distinc- tion between good for self and good for others ". I think, however, that he does not steadily keep before his mind the gulf that he has placed between himself and common-sense by the adoption of this important proposition ; and that, in consequence, he wastes his energies in trying to establish the untenable paradox that civil society is " founded on the* idea " of a common good of this kind. He admits, indeed, that i; we are very far, in our ordinary estimates of good, whether for ourselves or for others, from keeping such a standard before us ... the conviction of the commu- nity of good for all men has little positive influence over our practical judgments " ; good being, in fact, " sought in" objects which admit of being competed for ". But he does not seem to see that the acceptance of this proposed