Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/18

6 whatsoever—well-being; and it considers conduct in its direct or indirect relation to that end—that is, in the connection of actions immediately with well-being, or mediately with the conditions prerequisite to its attainment. Its fundamental assumptions are therefore at once simple, and, despite all doctrinaire theorizing to the contrary, practically though latently universal. We are alive. This is obviously for all of us the final fact, and no less obviously every proposed test of life's activities must ultimately be resolved into terms of this unresolvable first principle. Now, the facts of actual life favor neither the fatuous preconceptions of the optimist nor the equally wild asseverations of the pessimist. We can not assert, with Malebranche and Leibnitz, that this is the best of all possible worlds; or with Hartley, that "all individuals are actually and always infinitely happy"—a proposition which, as Mr. Leslie Stephen has well said, sounds like optimism run mad. But neither, on the other hand, can we accept the dogma of Chabot, that what we mistakenly call the cosmos is really the work of a crazy devil; or follow Schopenhauer in his statement that the universe is just as bad as it conceivably could be without falling to pieces altogether; or treat seriously the suggestion of Novalis, that the simultaneous suicide of all human creatures is the one way of escape from miseries that are both unbearable and irremediable. Optimism would logically negative any attempt to tamper with the facts of a world wherein it has already pertly concluded that whatever is is right; pessimism no less inevitably leads to a like passivity by treating life in its essence as radically too evil a thing to be susceptible of any improvement. But life, as I have said, fits the theories of neither pessimist nor optimist. It is not wholly bad, it is not wholly good; it is a thing of mingled yarn, good and ill together, with immeasurable capacity, in its higher forms especially, for the development of one element or the other. Moral conduct I therefore conceive to be, in a single phrase, conduct which betters existence, which adds to its sum total of happiness or decreases its sum total of pain. Action which makes life as a whole more fully worth living is as such right action; action which diminishes its value is as such wrong. The results upon which morality thus bases its incentives and restraints are therefore the actual results involved in the very constitution of things and not consequences artificially imposed by any external power. We reach in this way the ultimate conception of the immanent moral law, and for myself I see no way either of avoiding the resolution of all other possible criteria of conduct into the criterion thus established, or of getting behind such a standard in search of a final principle of a more universal, fundamental, and axiomatic character. Here, and here alone, it seems to me, we strike bed-rock.