Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/720

702 with deliberate intention or not, he has written a text-book, and his success or failure must be largely judged from this point of view. But it will be desirable first to notice the author's own standpoint, which is emphatically that of a follower of T. H. Green, though the influence of Aristotle is evident throughout the book. This is not to suggest that Mr. Rogers is narrow or intolerant: in the opinion of the reviewer, he could hardly have had two better teachers, though it is a matter for regret that he did not assimilate more of the spirit of Bishop Butler. But one recognizes throughout the whole account of Greek and modern ethics a somewhat undue preoccupation on the part of the author as to whether the system in question is logically valid or not. In a sense, this is an error in the right direction, for a history of ethics would be a poor affair, if it did not give the reader an increasing grasp of the essential 'methods of ethics'; the danger is, that every highly developed system, like that of Green, has a terminology of its own, which may be most helpful for purposes of exposition, but which, when employed in criticism, is likely to be anything but fair to other systems, proceeding upon fundamentally different assumptions.

But there is another prepossession on the part of the author which must be mentioned, though it comes from a very different source. The influence of Sidgwick is plainly apparent in his frequent reference to what he calls "exclusive egoism." This, for Mr. Rogers as for Sidgwick, implies the supposed tendency of egoism as a theory of the moral motive to pass over into a 'method of ethics,' i.e., "a method of obtaining reasoned convictions as to what ought to be done," according to Sidgwick's own definition. The mere fact that this supposed tendency has never materialized into a definite system, however fantastic, in the whole history of modern ethics, seems to impress Mr. Rogers as little as it did Sidgwick himself. As a matter of fact, even Hobbes, the classical arch-egoist, would have laughed at such a suggestion. The most fanatical exponent of the now happily defunct doctrine of "passive obedience" among the theologians of his time, or a good deal later, could not have more strenuously objected to any attempt on the part of the individual to determine the rightness or wrongness of actions by a computation of his merely private chances of pleasure in the particular case. In truth, egoism is not, and never has been, employed as a 'method of ethics'—"a method of obtaining reasoned convictions as to what ought to be done" though, as a theory of the moral motive, it enjoyed unprecedented popularity during the greater part of the eighteenth century and constantly tends to reappear in unexpected forms. It should always be remembered that the most patent difficulty of many of the eighteenth century systems—intuitional quite as much as hedonistic—was the flagrant dualism between the standard of moral evaluation assumed and this theory of the moral motive, which would not harmonize with any of them. The principal difference between the volumes, as regards the apportionment of space, lies in the fact that, while Sidgwick devoted a little less than a fifth of his Outlines to a chapter on "Christianity and Mediæval Ethics," Mr.