Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/97

Rh author's disinclination to adopt any one principle as fundamental to ethics leads not infrequently to a vagueness of statement that is seriously confusing, while it has not kept him from arguing now and then in quite a partisan spirit.

In chapter i, on "Fundamental Moral Ideas and Their Order," Professor Bowne agrees with Schleiermacher that there are three leading moral ideas, the good, duty, and virtue. "Each of these is essential in a system which is to express the complete moral consciousness of the race." The ancient attempt to construct a system of ethics with the idea of the good as a foundation is held to have resulted in "a vast amount of unedifying speculation." The "duty ethics" fares somewhat better, but in turn is regarded as incomplete and therefore unsatisfactory. The question as to the order of these ideas comes next under discussion, and here the author's vacillation for the first time becomes clearly evident. Schleiermacher, as he shows, makes the idea of the good unconditional. This gives rise to the idea of duty or obligation, and virtue consists in the recognition of these demands and in habitual submission to them. At first Professor Bowne is inclined to look quite askance at this view, but in the course of the chapter his scruples appear to be overcome in large measure, and he ends by practically adopting it.

Unless we can tell what the good is, our abstract ethics must be practically worthless, and to the discussion of this question the whole of the next chapter is devoted. The result, however, is somewhat disappointing. The author begins by saying, "Nothing can be called a good except in relation to the sensibility in its most general meaning" (p. 49). If "pleasure" be taken as synonymous with "the good," we are not to understand that "passive pleasure " alone is meant. This, of course, sounds like hedonism, and the important question would now arise, Shall we admit qualitative, or only quantitative, differences between pleasures? This is answered indirectly by saying that we cannot reduce goods to a common measure, since the ground of distinction between different goods "must be found in the objects themselves" (p. 53). We naturally should like to know what it is in the objects which constitutes the ground of distinction. Do some objects minister to human perfection, and some not? On page 55 we find an answer to this question. "The truth is, there is no way of defining the perfection of an agent except in terms of its well-being or happiness." This sounds, not only like hedonism, but like egoism.

Professor Bowne himself does not seem to be very well satisfied with the result. At the beginning of the next chapter, on "Need of a Subjective Standard," he remarks, "Somehow or other we fail to get on. Some mistaken psychology has been ruled out, but about the only