Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/191

166 as yet at all; else would he have no work to do. Let him then not deceive himself. The conflict itself is real and not illusory. The illusion lies in the fact that no one of the fighters realizes the inner life of the others. But to overcome that illusion in any soul is not to show that all the fighters have been desiring the same thing.

J. S. Mill is by no means our only case of the effort to convince people that they always have had one object of search, which the moralist has but to name in order to bring peace on the earth. Bentham undertook the same task, and showed in his blunt way as much skill in subterfuge as he ever accused his opponents of showing, while he tried to make out that all men always have been Benthamites, to whom pleasure was the only good. Mr. Spencer in his turn tries to define the Good so that it shall agree not only with the popular usage of the word good, but also with the Spencerian notion of what constitutes the Good. If anywhere a usage of the word appears that does not agree with the Spencerian usage, Mr. Spencer insists, sometimes, that, if cross-questioned, the man who so uses it would have to come over to the Spencerian usage, and sometimes that the usage in question is a survival in culture of a savage notion, or that it is in some other way insignificant. Thus the proof of Mr. Spencer’s view about the nature of the ideal becomes so simple and easy that when, a little further on, it is necessary to recognize the existence of pessimists, Mr. Spencer finds no difficulty in regarding it as perfectly plain that a man can become a