Page:Philosophical Review Volume 29.djvu/362

348 idealism itself. As overt utterances it is their function to confirm and strengthen the quality of idealism which they have expressed.

It is better to understand them so and to prize them in their proper ideal quality than to turn them to a use which belittles them. For happiness taken as a criterion can mean only pleasure, and pleasure the fixation of present habit. Self-realization, in the same misuse, means either an unacknowledged reverence for accredited tradition or, for the newly enlightened, a shallow impatience of traditional restraints. The virtues harden into a Pharisaical dogmatism. It is no disparagement of the ideals of ethical theory to say that if they are held aloof from such misapplication, it is a matter of no great moment which one of them one professes. To say this means that they are all members of one series or one system, so related that, starting from any one, as a man's temperament, perhaps, may determine, one may make a dialectical circuit of them all. This indeed is why the history of ethics is a history of controversy. Kept as ideals they may all serve equally, because as ideals they are all alike names for deliverance and escape and signs of renewed interest in living. To conceive them as ends, and so to apply them as criteria, is to take