Page:Principia Ethica 1922.djvu/106

72 my hand, because it was his pleasure to produce it, is now and at this moment a part of the happiness which he felt many years ago and which has so long ceased to be. Pray consider a moment what this contemptible nonsense really means. ‘Money,’ says Mill, ‘is only desirable as a means to happiness.’ Perhaps so, but what then? ‘Why,’ says Mill, ‘money is undoubtedly desired for its own sake.’ ‘Yes, go on,’ say we. ‘Well,’ says Mill, ‘if money is desired for its own sake, it must be desirable as an end-in-itself: I have said so myself.’ ‘Oh,’ say we, ‘but you have also said just now that it was only desirable as a means.’ ‘I own I did,’ says Mill, ‘but I will try to patch up matters, by saying that what is only a means to an end, is the same thing as a part of that end. I daresay the public won’t notice.’ And the public haven’t noticed. Yet this is certainly what Mill has done. He has broken down the distinction between means and ends, upon the precise observance of which his Hedonism rests. And he has been compelled to do this, because he failed to distinguish ‘end’ in the sense of what is desirable, from ‘end’ in the sense of what is desired: a distinction which, nevertheless, both the present argument and his whole book presupposes. This is a consequence of the naturalistic fallacy.

44. Mill, then, has nothing better to say for himself than this. His two fundamental propositions are, in his own words, ‘that to think of an object as desirable (unless for the sake of its consequences), and to think of it as pleasant, are one and the same thing; and that desire anything except in proportion as the idea of it is pleasant, is a physical and metaphysical impossibility .’ Both of these statements are, we have seen, merely supported by fallacies. The first seems to rest on the naturalistic fallacy; the second rests partly on this, partly on the fallacy of confusing ends and means, and partly on the fallacy of confusing a pleasant thought with the thought of a pleasure. His very language shews this. For that the idea of a thing is pleasant, in his second clause, is obviously meant to be the same fact which he denotes by ‘thinking of it as pleasant,’ in his first.