Page:Philosophical Review Volume 29.djvu/534

520 It would be bad enough even were we all agreed on the comparison of various goods, and knew just how much weight ought to attach in our calculation to the creation of an object of beauty, say, as over against an equal effort spent in health-producing exercise, or in giving good advice to our friends—all of them supposedly goods of a sort. The mere quantitative complexity is itself enough to destroy any real chance of ever coming to a rational conclusion. Ethics, to be sure, need not set its demand quite so high as this; it might be content with such factors as the human mind could reasonably be expected to lay hold of. But even this would at each moment of choice set a painful and laborious task of calculation, which at least would be likely to prove fatal to the freshness and spontaneity of the moral life. But now the supposition that the factors, though numerous, are in them- selves unambiguous, and that there is no particular difficulty in ranking simple goods, is of course quite contrary to fact. Not only do men fail to agree, but no man agrees with himself at all times; and often his judgment about the relative value of things in themselves is in the highest degree tentative and uncertain.

But there is a more fundamental defect in the method proposed. It is important, if we are ever to expect any definite guidance in the good life, and are not to be put off with abstractions, to emphasize the fact that the good is, up to a point, incurably specific and individual. One of the most serious failings of ethical thought has been its imperfect vision of the multiplicity of human ideals. In its sense for the urgent need of introducing unity and harmony into the ethical experience, it has tended to ignore the individual aspect which ideals must take on before they are fit to stand for anything that real human beings actually want. In this tendency it has been backed and abetted by one of the most universal of human failings. The principle, Live and let live, seldom has played any but a very modest rôle in history. Our first reaction toward national and racial ideals other than our own is that of intolerance; and if experience and necessity have compelled the Englishman, say, to give up part of his natural contempt for the frog-eating Frenchman, he still