Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/687

671 own parts; an organic unity is "a unity which is the end of its parts." In this sense, we are compelled by the facts to deny that the society of the present is organic; it is not the end of the individuals composing it. "Each of us is more than the society which unites us, because there is in each of us the longing for a perfection which that society can never realize." Nor (3) can we say that social progress is always and necessarily in the direction of a more organic unity, since individualization is as necessary to perfection as unification, and experience alone can tell us in which direction progress lies. If "only in a perfect unity could perfect individuals exist," it is also true that "none but perfect individuals could unite in a perfect unity."

J. S.

The psychological and the material aspects of pleasure must be distinguished, or pleasure as a mere quality of psychological activity, and as a quality of the thing desired. Psychological hedonism is necessarily egoistic and non-moral. Only in its material aspect can pleasure have any place in a system of ethics. The results of such a view of pleasure as an ethical principle are: (1) the obligatoriness of the higher desires, as possessing superior value to the lower; (2) the equal reality and higher obligatoriness of the pleasures of society. Yet (3) it remains true that the supreme moral desire of the individual is a desire for his highest happiness, and that it is impossible to conceive of such happiness except in terms of society. Highest happiness is thus the summum bonum, not in the psychological sense, but in the material sense, of the most valued objects of our desires, both their possession and their use. To the question, why the individual conceives his highest happiness to be something in which he as an individual can by no possibility actually share, the only answer is that moral activity is itself one of the factors which, in man's development, have helped to determine what highest happiness is. The question which ethical systems have to meet, would seem then to be, not what is the summum bonum, for that is happiness, but what is the distinctive mark of moral activity, what characterizes man as a moral being. And the only intelligible conception of morality is "conduct thought to be universally binding under the conditions of human life." Moral values are what they are because they are human values ; they are the product of man's total development. The alternative is between a pleasure theory of conduct and a moral theory of conduct.

J. S.

The present methods of penal administration are, by common consent, a failure; they not only fail to reform offenders, but produce a deteriorating