Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/188

Rh We point this out in order to show that we do not fall into the hackneyed error of those moralists who insist that they merely tell men what one thing it is that men have all been blindly seeking. Such moralists often say: “Our system is but an expression of the tendency that was always there, latent in men. It tells them in plain words what they always wanted, and then it tells them how to get this end.” This specious pretense of so many moral systems we have implicitly condemned in the previous part of our discourse. It constitutes in many cases that appeal to the physical facts which we have set aside as always useless and often ungrounded. If one looks the pretense fairly in the face, how flat and stale it seems! Yonder vast wealth of conflicting aims among men, base and noble, devilish and divine, — what moralist has been able to sum all of them up in any formula, save in the wholly abstract formula that we have above referred to, namely, that all these beings seek what seems to them desirable. How presumptuous to say to them: “In fact you all desire this that I formulate in my text-book of morals.” In fact they do not. And it is absurd to watch the turnings and twistings of language by which a moralist tries to make out that they do. For instance, let the moralist be J. S. Mill, and let him declare, as he does, that happiness is the one goal of all men. If happiness includes the attainment of any possible object of anybody's desire, then indeed the theory is a truism. But with this truism, of course, no sort of progress would have been made in ethics. Mill must tell us something about what