Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/196

 184 HENBY SIDGWICK: larly the hardest choice which Christian self-denial imposes ^is the preference of the work apparently most socially useful to the work apparently most conducive to the agent's own scientific and aesthetic development. 1 It may be replied that Art and Science are good, but Virtue better ; that the self-devotion which leads a man to postpone to duty the fullest possible realisation of his scien- tific or artistic faculties is an exercise in which a fuller development of his nature as a whole is attained. I cannot conceive any empirical criterion of " fulness of development " by which this could be made to appear even probable as a universal proposition : but if we grant it to be true, in all cases in which the occasion for such a sacrifice may be pre- sented, it can only be because the superiority in importance of the " specifically moral virtues," as compared with All other skills and gifts to culture dear, is held to be so great that the alternatives may be regarded as practically incommensurable. But if this be so, it seems to me that the promotion of the specifically moral virtues considering the amount that remains to be done in this direction ought in consistency to occupy so large a share of the practical philanthropist's attention that Green's inclu- sion of Art and Science will turn out to have hardly any real significance. In short Green seems to me to have uncon- sciously tried to get the advantages of two distinct and iiicompatible conceptions of human good : the one liberally Comprehensive, but palpably admitting competition, the other non-competitive but stoically or puritanically narrow. If, again, we concentrate our attention on the narrower conception of " specifically moral virtue," we find a similar difficulty in combining, as Green wishes us to do, formal and material criteria of virtuous action : nor do I think that matters are improved by the trenchant and dogmatic solu- tion of the difficulty which Green here offers. Sometimes the formal criterion is put forward in language which would satisfy the most orthodox Kantian: "the only good," we are told, " which is really common to all who pursue it is that which consists in the universal will to be good" (p. 1 I think Green unconsciously evades the difficulty which this choice presents, on his theory, when he speaks (pp. 292-3) of " the conscientious man sacrificing personal pleasure in satisfaction of the claims of human brotherhood . . . the good citizen has no leisure to think of developing his own faculties of enjoyment ". Of course his good man, being anti- hedonistic, has no theoretical difficulty in sacrificing his own pleasure or enjoyment or indeed that of anyone else : but we may still ask whether and why and how far he is called upon to sacrifice the realisation of his scientific and artistic capabilities.