Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/157

No. 2.] judgment, before the word has any appropriateness; it does not seem to represent an immediate description of feeling quality, like pleasantness, but a reflective quality. Accordingly the statement, 'pleasure is good,' goes beyond the statement, 'pleasure is pleasant,' in that it adds to the quality of pleasantness recognized as the essence of the experience itself another fact, namely, that it arouses pleasant or approving thoughts. Unless I am deceiving myself, this offers a way of escape from Mr. Moore's main criticism. When I say that pleasure (or any other substitute that may be proposed) is good, I am not, in the first instance, to be understood as meaning that pleasure is a definition of good, but that pleasure is a case of good; the further meaning then will be that, over and above its pleasantness, it is the object of a judgment of approval. We have no disposition to say in turn that the approval is good, in the sense in which we say that pleasure is good. We do not for the moment think of the approval, or its pleasantness, at all. We do think of the original pleasantness as good, but we are able to do so only because we are in a certain attitude of mind to it which is not its own object, but only, if at all, the object of a subsequent thought; and this last is not itself a case of value judgment, but one of plain matter of fact. But now for a real definition, naturally we should turn the sentence around, and make 'good' its subject. Good then will be defined, not as some particular object of approval, or as our approval of it, but as anything which we approve,—the abstract character, that is, of calling forth approval. 'Is this good?', Mr. Moore says, is a different state of mind from 'Is this pleasant, or desired, or approved?' Now, of the first two terms, I have myself maintained that this is true. 'Is this good?' is a different state of mind from, 'Is this pleasant or desired?'; for it involves not only the pleasantness, or relation to desire, but also the way I judge this. So, too, in both cases, though I may hold that I should never make the judgment apart from such a quality in the object, I also grant that not in every case does the presence of the quality call forth the judgment; and this again gives point to the distinction between the two forms of question. But I cannot feel that 'approved' stands on just the same footing. When I ask what I mean by