Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/95

] There are three chapters in Part I., entitled Hedonism, or the Ethics of Sensibility, Rigorism, or the Ethics of Reason, and Eudæmonism, or the Ethics of Personality. The first two trace Hedonism and Stoicism from their rise among the Greeks down to the present day, and point out the defects of these systems. The exposition is clear and, in spite of the generalizations which brevity necessitated, in the main just; and if the criticisms contain little that is new, it is because the subject has already been so thoroughly threshed that nothing new remained to be said. Beginners will appreciate the amount of information—historical and critical—which is brought together in these two chapters. There are one or two criticisms, however, to which certain passages in these chapters are open. When Professor Seth speaks of the melancholy of the Stoics as "strange to the buoyant spirit of the earlier Greeks" (p. 160), he must have forgotten that when the Greek first appears on the stage of human history, his character is tinged with a vein of melancholy, as may be seen from the Homeric poems, in which also its source is traced to Hellenic insight into the limitations of humanity. This is only an incidental remark, and, whether true or false, it is not of any great importance. The same cannot be said, however, of Professor Seth's account of the Intuitionists and especially of Butler. Professor Sidgwick certainly gives all the emphasis it will stand to Butler's doctrine of Self-love; but when our author, following along the same line, declares that with Butler "Virtue is not synonymous with Benevolence, but in a sense it is synonymous with Self-love" (p. 180), one would like to know what that favorite phrase, "in a sense" (which Professor Seth seems to have adopted from English Hegelians) really means in this connection. The statement will surprise students of Butler. The demand for an explanation is the more imperative as we are told on the next page (p. 181) that "His refusal to identify Conscience with Self-love leads Butler to rest in an irreducible dualism of the spheres governed by these two principles respectively—the spheres of Virtue and Prudence."

The objections which Professor Seth brings forward to the ethical position of Butler and the Intuitionists are equally applicable to his own theory, and indeed to every ethical theory—excepting that which "explains" virtue by resolving it into something else. When he says they give us "no explanation of morality, no theory of virtue" (p. 181), I would ask if the formula of Self-realization does anything better. Professor Seth seems to think that Intuitionism must be beaten down or he cannot advance to the heights of