Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/175

No. 2.] constitution; to determine it, self-knowledge is what I need most of all. The tendency has always been to set up one single ideal, and to impose it upon everybody. The last lesson which the good man has to learn,—and it is not always that he learns it,—is that a personal ideal cannot be imposed apart from the particular wants and limitations of the individual concerned. And, on the side of self-imposed ideals, an enormous amount of distress and waste effort has been due to the feeling that we ought to aim at something which we may admire, apart from the question whether we are personally fitted for its attainment, or capable of taking real satisfaction in the life for which it calls. Objectively, I am bound in so far to admire the man more, and regard him as the bigger man, who is capable, we will say, of a double amount of work; but it does not follow that I ought myself to endeavor to work twice as hard. If I am a lesser man, if I only have energy enough to do half the amount with ease and satisfaction, and if to speed myself up would only make me worried and unhappy, I ought not to do this simply because I see that objectively it is more admirable. In other words, to discover my own duty I must study my own constitution and desires; and the only final test that I am succeeding is, not consistency with some concrete objective standard capable of being determined for everyone alike by reasoning it out, but my own satisfaction and assured content in the outcome. There may be individuals who find it a demand of their nature that they should aim directly at the sum total of good, and have this constantly as a motive in their minds. They are needed, probably, in order to keep one important aspect of the situation before us. But most people, it seems clear, will do better in the end to follow out their own particular interest because it is theirs, glancing only occasionally at the totality of things, and then usually to make sure that they are offering no obstruction, rather than with the view positively of enriching the general content. For not only do calculations in such vast terms quickly become unmanageable,—Mr. Moore, for example, from his own point of view, seems logical in his scepticism about the possibility of any rational conclusions in the realm of practical