Page:Philosophical Review Volume 7.djvu/405

391 Precisely the same objection exists against the statement of the ethical problem in the familiar formula : Is happiness the summum bonum? This question implies that there are various bona, of which one, happiness, is viewed as distinct from the others and as possessing a unique value. The truth is that happiness is the subjective, affective, evaluative aspect of all conceivable bona. Nothing would be a bonum, did it not make somewhere, at some time, contribution to the satisfaction of some sentient being. But it is equally true that this affective state of consciousness can never be found apart from some thing (be it some object of cognition, or some activity, or power of the self) which is capable of being viewed objectively and without immediate reference to the satisfaction which it produces.

It remains to consider briefly the significance of this view of the evaluation of life for an ethical theory. It may seem that such a frank avowal of the important rôle which sensibility plays in the theory of the Good, amounts to an unqualified acceptance of Hedonism. Such, however, is not the case. An adequate account of the Good, must transcend the subjectivity of the ordinary hedonistic view. While happiness is admitted to be the subjective, passive, affective, and evaluative side of the concept, it is still necessary to describe its objective, active, ideational, and constitutive side. In the present paper I have been particularly concerned to show the psychological truth of the happiness theory; for only by a full recognition of its truth can the theory be safely transcended. Indeed, it is just by planting oneself upon the indubitable fact that the evaluation of all experience is ultimately given in feeling, that one secures the true vantage ground for further inquiry. But when this fact is admitted, one is prepared, to ask: How are desirable states of feeling made possible? What are their ideational equivalents? On what activities do they depend? What objective interests do they require or presuppose? Thus an objective, as well as a subjective, norm is secured. For a desirable affective state is not something that can support itself, or hang suspended in mid-air. Apart from other aspects of conscious life it is as much an abstraction and as unreal as any ideal of Perfection or of Fulness of Life apart from