Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/579

No. 5.] definition of morality in terms of a "gradual, though not continuous, progress towards codes of conduct which make for the presentation of life and for happiness." The practical schemes determined by these codes "enabled men, by abstention from dangerous passions and from idleness, to make their lives efficient, interesting, and comparatively free from pain" (p. 31).

Part II is a discussion of the theory of morality and, in the main, remains consistent with the physiological definition arrived at in Part I. Here the author is not lacking in providing simple solutions for philosophical questions. The argument turns on a distinction of what is intrinsically and what is extrinsically good,—the distinction which is most commonly described in ethical theory as that of means and end. "To men everywhere it is an to be in severe physical pain or to be maimed in body, to be shut away from air, from food, from other people. It is a good to taste an appetizing dish, to exercise when well and rested, to hear harmonious music, to feel the sweet emotion of love. The fact that men argue upon judgments does not prove them true; but these are not judgments, they are perceptions. To call love good is not to give an opinion, it is to describe a fact. It is a matter of direct first-hand feeling, whose reality consists in its being felt. To say that these experiences are good or bad is equivalent to saying that they feel good or bad; there can be no dispute about it."

"This is the bottom fact of ethics. Different experiences have different intrinsic worth as they pass. ... The good moments are their own excuse for being, a part of the brightness and worth of life. They need nothing ulterior to justify them. The bad moments feel bad, and that is the end of it; they are bad-feeling moments, and no sophistication can deny it. Conscious life looked at from this point of view, and abstracted from all its other aspects, is a flux of plus and minus values. ... In the last analysis, all differences in value, including all moral distinctions, rest upon this disparity in the immediate worth of conscious states."

"We may say absolutely that if it were not for this fundamental difference in feeling there would be no such thing as morality" (pp. 73, 74, 75). The same fleshly principle is employed in determining the highest good. "That sort of behavior is best which will in the long run bring into being the greatest possible amount of intrinsic goodness and the least intrinsic evil" (p. 80). Goodness of conduct is "virtue," and "for intrinsic good the most widely accepted name ... is happiness." With reference to the question, What is happiness?—"The puzzle is not to recognize it, but to get it. By happiness we mean the steady presence of what we call intrinsic goodness and the absence of intrinsic badness; it is as undefinable as any ultimate element of experience, but as well known to us as blackness and whiteness or light and dark" (pp. 80, 81). To make it perfectly sure that there is no other possible point of view for ethics than the hedonistic, the author finds that "the ultimate criterion must always be the greatest good of the greatest number" (p. 130). And "What makes one form of happiness more worthy than another is simply in the first place its greater keenness or extent or freedom from pain, and in