Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/203

178 illogically accepted a partially correct fundamental notion about the ideal of life, does suggest a good deal about this problem of applied ethics with which we are now dealing. He does tell us some very sensible things about the attainment of this ideal.

Among these sensible suggestions is the insistence upon the value of pleasure as an indication of the increase of healthy life in the man who has the pleasure; and the further insistence upon the thought that, since pleasure thus indicates in some wise health and efficiency, and since efficiency is an indispensable prerequisite to sound practical morality, there must always be a certain moral presumption in favor of happiness, and in favor of whatever tends to increase happiness. Properly understood and limited, this doctrine of Mr. Spencer’s is an obvious and useful consequence from what we know of psychology. Mr. Spencer dwells on it at tedious and wholly unnecessary length, but he is surely justified when he protests, against the ascetics, that their ideal man must be in general a puny, inefficient, and perhaps wholly burdensome man, whose ill-health may make him, at last, hopelessly selfish. This we know on good scientific grounds, and it is well to have said the thing plainly in an ethical treatise.

But what is the result? Is happiness the only aim of life because the permanently unhappy man is apt to be a poor diseased creature, useless, or even dangerous? No; the consequence of all this is that the first moral aim must be to make a man efficient in possessing and extending the moral insight. Efficiency for moral ends is still oiir proximate goal.