Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/622

606, thought, rational activity. ... In a word, the value of thought is ideal " (Vol. I, pp. 218, 219).

This naturally raises the question as to the author's conception of the Good, for it is evident already that his ethics must be an ethics of the Good and not a duty ethics. Early in the book he pronounces most emphatically against the ascetic conception of morality. He says: "To deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil is a grotesque affectation; it amounts to giving 'good' and 'evil' artificial definitions and thereby reducing ethics to arbitrary verbiage" (Vol. I, p. 55). Indeed, the ideal of human happiness or well-being, taken in its highest and most comprehensive sense, seems to be regarded as central not only for ethics as a differentiated discipline, but for philosophy as a whole. Thus philosophy may be regarded as ideally the ultimate science and the supreme art of life, though only because the True and the Beautiful are necessarily involved in the conception of the Supreme Good of a spiritual being. It goes without saying that eudaemonism of this type, while frankly hostile to ascetic and rationalistic methods of ethics, is by no means reducible to terms of ordinary hedonism. It begins by taking due account of the original impulsive tendencies of our nature that demand satisfaction and implies at every stage of the argument the organizing activity of reason itself. "Impulse makes value possible ; and the value becomes actual when the impulse issues in processes that give it satisfaction and have a conscious worth. Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character " (Vol. I, p. 223).

Thus far the first volume only has been considered, because this contains Professor Santayana's discussion of the general problems of philosophy. The character of the second volume, on "Reason in Society," maybe partly inferred from the titles of the chapters, which are as follows: "Love," "The Family," "Industry, Government, and War," "The Aristocratic Ideal," "Democracy," "Free Society," "Patriotism," and "Ideal Society." It would be difficult to do justice to the more specific discussions of the second volume by any brief criticism. There is less of consecutiveness here than in the first volume, each chapter consisting of a more or less independent essay on the subject indicated by the title. The treatment is also rather more popular, though the positions taken are not more conventional. On the whole, these essays are decidedly interesting and suggestive, though none of them can be said to rise to the very high level of the author's essay on "The Poetry of Barbarism" in his Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, which does so much to define his attitude not only toward art but toward life itself.