Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/544

532 far removed from being a syncretist. He has sought to embody in his own theory the contributions of different schools of thought, and has succeeded admirably, in the main, in this difficult task. He has shown a sound estimate of the place of historical references in an introductory treatise. Experience seems to demonstrate that the history of ethical thought means little to those who have never faced the problems of ethics through a systematic study of the concrete facts of the moral life itself. The historical material in many textbooks probably has little more value in the end than does a list of the kings of England, which some of us were condemned to learn in our youth. Professor Everett has devoted two chapters of his book to the history of the controversy between hedonism and perfectionism. Apart from this he keeps the attention turned upon the moral experience itself, rather than upon résumés of what this, that, or the other writer has chosen to say about it.

Professor Everett's position one would like to characterize as universalistic hedonism of the type of Hume. This, I think, is in essence what it is. But Professor Everett himself would vigorously protest against any such classification. Morality, he says, is a matter of values; and value has two sides which may be called, for want of a better nomenclature, the subjective and the objective. On the subjective side value is pleasure. But the author insists, pleasure is a mere abstraction; it is always found in connection with some content, "the objects or activities in connection with which the feelings arise." "Only if disembodied states of feeling could wander at large quite independent of all other mental content" could value be described solely in terms of pleasure. The whole experience is the thing that is valuable.

In a certain sense all this is undoubtedly true. In this sense no hedonist, as far as I can see, has ever had the slightest idea of denying it. Similarly the color red never appears alone. It is always part of red objects of various shapes, sizes, textures, etc. Nevertheless, if redness supplied the content of value, it would be perfectly intelligible to say that red as such is the good, the other elements of the red object being, from this point of view, indifferent. I think Professor Everett may have failed to see this fact because of one of the greatest excellences of his book. Various more or less plausible objections may be urged against hedonism, but the deadliest is that even if true it is of no great use in practice. The main lines of action are determined, as the author points out, by other methods than the use of the hedonistic calculus, strictly so called. Our ordinary procedure in everyday life,