THE RATIONAL GOOD : 
 
 A STUDY IN THE LOGIC OF PRACTICE
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY 
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 Ex Libria 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 THE RATIONAL 
 GOOD: A STUDY IN 
 
 THE LOGIC OF PRACTICE 
 
 By L. T. HOBHOUSE, D.LiT., 
 
 LL.D., MARTIN WHITE PROFESSOR OF 
 SOCIOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 
 
 LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. 
 RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i
 
 First published in 1921 
 
 (All rights reserved)
 
 SANTA BAKBAKA 
 
 Hfc 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAQK 
 INTRODUCTION ......... 9 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE SPRINGS OF ACTION ....... 19 
 
 (i) Impulse, as opposed to reason, seems to dominate human 
 action. (2) This view has been fortified by psychological 
 analysis which sees in the alleged " reasons " for action an 
 expression for underlying impulses. (3) But, if intellect 
 without impulse is void, impulse without intellect is blind, 
 (4) and the intellectual element is not purely derivative but has 
 intellectual sources. (5) On the other hand, it is a fallacy 
 to oppose the Practical Reason to the body of impulse as a whole. 
 
 (6) In fact intelligence begins by defining the ends of impulse, 
 
 (7) while, as it develops, impulse is transformed. The question 
 is, what part intelligence (and in particular Reason) plays in 
 the transformation. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 IMPULSE AND CONTROL ....... 36 
 
 (1) " Bare " impulse involves but is not identical with feeling. 
 
 (2) The function of feeling is to guide impulse in adaptation to 
 the conditions of life. (3) Impulse informed by anticipation 
 of an end is desire. The term has then a wider meaning than 
 that of " bare " impulse. (4) The impulse to an inclusive End 
 involving many related desires is a volition, (5) and the impulse 
 to an end dominating all life is the Will. (6) The Will is the 
 mass of impulse as an organized system (7) resting on feeling 
 in a generic sense of the term. (8) The principle of Control 
 then lies not outside, but within the system of impulse-feeling, 
 and it is here if anywhere that practical rationality must be 
 found. 
 
 5
 
 6 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 PAOK 
 THE RATIONAL ......... 56 
 
 (1) The rational judgment is that which is consistent, grounded 
 and objective, the first two characters being the test of the third. 
 
 (2) The search for grounds leads up to immediate judgments 
 both particular and general. Particular immediate judgments, 
 however, are not indubitably true, but are corroborated by 
 interconnexion. (3) Immediate general judgments likewise 
 require interconnexion. (4) Interconnectedness is in fact the 
 rational basis of belief. (5) The grounds on which intercon- 
 nexion rests are universal relations. (6) The principles of 
 interconnexion rest on the consilience of all consistent acts of 
 inference. (7) The rational in cognition is then the effort to 
 attain truth by the persistent interconnexion of judgments 
 through universal relations. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE GOOD ......... 65 
 
 (i) Is there any reason in the choice of ultimate ends, i.e. is 
 there a Rational Good ? (2) Generically the Good appears as 
 a harmony (mutual support) of feeling and effort, (3) or of 
 feeling and passive experience including, e.g., observation of the 
 behaviour of another. Generically pleasure is feeling in har- 
 mony and pain in disharmony. (4) The fact asserted by the 
 judgment " This is Good " is thus a relation between an experi- 
 ence and a feeling. Either element may be called good as 
 pertaining to the whole. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD ....... 78 
 
 (i) The Rational Good must be a consistent scheme of purposes 
 interconnected by universal relations in which subjective 
 disturbance is eliminated. (2) This involves a dual harmony 
 of feeling with feeling and of feeling with experience. (3) There 
 may be internal consistency from a more partial point of view 
 but rationality involves universalism, i.e. a system compre- 
 hending the whole world of all minds in a single scheme. 
 (4) The authority of this scheme rests on the fact that the judg- 
 ments composing it form a reasonable system, and assert a
 
 CONTENTS 7 
 
 PAGE 
 
 reality which is not dependent on the opinion of the individual. 
 Its psychological force is the organization of impulse-feeling 
 which reason effects. (5) The foundation of the reality which 
 it asserts is the interconnectedness of all minds. (6) The 
 elements of impulse-feeling evolve under the conditions of 
 existence and are of the instinctive type. (7) The impulse 
 towards harmony is rational though it has not attained finality 
 but continually corrects itself. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD ........ 96 
 
 (i) Harmony involves the modification of impulses so far as 
 incompatible. (2) This depends on the development of per- 
 sonality, (3) and of the social principle. (4) Development is 
 a progressive harmony (5) which in its matured form may 
 be described as happiness in the fulfilment of life as a whole. 
 (6) This definition is not incompatible with the principle that 
 the individual mind requires an object beyond itself. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 APPLICATIONS . . . . . . . . .120 
 
 (1) The recognized moral order contains irrational elements. 
 
 (2) How are rational principles to be brought into relation with 
 it ? (3) Different interests must be preserved except so far as 
 they conflict. (4) Where there is conflict the test is consistency 
 carried through life as a whole. (5) In developing a rational 
 order three rules of method are of use, (6) viz. (a) the system 
 must " work," (7) (&) must impose no restraint not necessary 
 for its working, (8) (c) must be impartial. (9) Bearing of the 
 principle on abstract rights and collective wholes. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 IMPLICATIONS 137 
 
 (1) Relation of the Principle of Harmony to Utilitarianism 
 
 (2) and to Idealism. (3) Self-sacrifice cannot be resolved into 
 self-realization. (4) Disparity of values, apparently opposed 
 to the principle, is found to corroborate it. (5) The sanction 
 of the principle is internal harmony. (6) It accords with a 
 spiritual interpretation of the world-process. (7) The anti- 
 ethical view of development is false.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 THE following chapters were originally written in 1908-9, 
 in amplification of a sketch of ethical theory contained 
 in my Morals in Evolution, which had been published 
 three years earlier. I was not, however, satisfied with 
 the result, and put the manuscript aside for several years. 
 It has now been almost entirely re-written. My obliga- 
 tions to various writers on Psychology and Ethics will 
 be manifest, but the general theory which most nearly 
 corresponds to the central doctrine of the work is 
 one which I heard expounded in a paper read in New 
 York in 1911 by a distinguished lecturer on Ethics, 
 and have never met with again in print. Mr. J. A. 
 Hobson kindly read the work in its original form, and 
 made many valuable criticisms. Mr. A. W. Ferris has 
 performed the same service to the revised work, and 
 several alterations and additions are due to his sugges- 
 tions. I have also to thank him for revising the proofs. 
 
 L. T. H. 
 
 WIMBLEDON, 
 October, 1920.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 WHAT is right, we have often been told, is the easiest 
 thing in the world to know and the most difficult thing 
 to do. Unfortunately truth will not compress itself into 
 epigram, and a facile antithesis is usually misleading. 
 To deal plainly with himself is perhaps enough for a man 
 in ninety-nine cases, but the hundredth, if he still deals 
 plainly, will present a real difficulty. Moreover the 
 ninety-nine cases are, or appear to be, so easy because 
 the man lives and moves and acts in a society with denned 
 standards, established relations, express or implied under- 
 standings under which he has himself grown up and to 
 which his sense of right and wrong has adapted itself. 
 He knows in the ordinary case what is expected of him, 
 and he expects nothing else of himself. If these standards 
 are assumed, private conduct becomes a matter of their 
 application, and it is true that this is, in any ordinary 
 case, simple enough. But suppose the social standards 
 themselves to be called in question. By what standard 
 shall they be judged ? Here is a question which is so 
 far from simple that the plain man recoils from it. Why 
 question the wisdom of our ancestors, the system which 
 has worked not perfectly perhaps, but still has worked 
 and has made us what we are ? Let us do our duty 
 in that state of life to which it shall please God to call 
 us, and be thankful that we are members of a stable 
 community with stations provided for all respectable 
 people to fill. Unfortunately we cannot dispose of the 
 question in this manner. Our standards criticize them- 
 selves. We have spoken of defined and recognized rules
 
 io THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 which are not difficult to apply. But if we look closely 
 into the network of current ideas of conduct we shall 
 find not one standard but several. There are codes of 
 law and custom, good manners and good taste, partly 
 supplementing, partly correcting one another. In par- 
 ticular, behind the code of ordinary respectable society 
 are principles higher and more austere, intolerant of 
 much which the working standard allows. In large 
 measure these principles are embodied in the teaching 
 of the Churches and in that sense belong to the officially 
 recognized tradition. The shifts and devices by which 
 they are accommodated to the working standard form 
 the familiar theme of the satirist, and do not concern us 
 for the moment. Our point is merely that while it may 
 be quite easy for a man to apply the everyday standard 
 to his particular case, and equally easy as an intellectual 
 exercise to apply an ideal standard, he may find in the 
 result that what is permitted by one code is repudiated, 
 if he takes it seriously, by the other, and his real difficulty 
 is to answer the question : under which Lord ? Now 
 the same question at bottom confronts society as a whole. 
 It lives on a certain tradition. It has its network of 
 institutions, customs, and understandings. But it also 
 contains germs and possibilities of a different life. The 
 time is past when men in the mass simply took the 
 established order for granted. They react upon it freely 
 and seek avowedly to mould it to their own ideals. But 
 again, there are more ideals than one, and between them 
 what is to decide ? The established order sits serene 
 while the ideals wrangle over the succession. Indeed, to 
 some of them it may apply the wit of Charles II : " They 
 will never kill me, James, to make you king." It must 
 be admitted that ideals may attract the fanatics, the 
 ill-balanced, and the mischief-makers. Violence is met 
 by violence, and the question of right and wrong becomes 
 an issue between numbers and organization, perhaps in 
 the last resort between the bomb and the machine gun. 
 Morality itself is as old as mankind, but the moral 
 ideal seems to be by comparison a recent growth. The
 
 INTRODUCTION n 
 
 question has often been asked whether any tribe, however 
 primitive, has subsisted without some form of religion, 
 and the answer depends on what we mean by religion. 
 But if the question be whether any tribe has existed 
 without morality, the reply can be made more definite. 
 Investigation has shown that the simplest and most 
 primitive peoples known have their definite codes of 
 custom according to which every one knows what he is 
 to expect and what is expected of him. The code is 
 ordinarily observed, and it suffices to cover as much as 
 is essential in the simple relations of primitive life, to 
 give a certain protection to person and property, and a 
 certain regularity to sex-regulations. Generally, it has 
 behind it a certain body of belief, sometimes of religious, 
 more often of magical, colour. But its real strength is 
 the force of custom itself and the underlying fear of 
 anything that would profoundly change or destroy the 
 social order. In this sense, then, investigation shows 
 morality to be universal, and general considerations point 
 to the same conclusion. For we may well ask how any 
 number of human beings could live permanently together 
 unless they understood one another, and how they could 
 understand one another unless they knew what to expect 
 and what would be expected of them under given con- 
 ditions, and unless, on the whole, they had confidence that 
 the expectations would be realized. These things can only 
 be if men have defined obligations to which ordinarily 
 they are loyal. 
 
 As society enlarges and developes, morality is elaborated 
 and, on the whole, refined. The code has to deal with 
 wider and more complex relations, and primitive custom 
 breaks up into the law which has its definite organs of 
 enforcement and morality in the narrower sense, which 
 covers the finer and more personal issues. There is, as 
 we all know, a rich variety of detail in the legal and moral 
 codes of various times and places, yet in fundamental 
 principle there is more agreement in the actual working 
 codes of society than we of the " higher " civilizations 
 like to acknowledge. For the working code, we may say
 
 12 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 generally, is of the nature of a compromise between self 
 and society. It takes the ordinary man just as he is 
 with all his confused and often conflicting impulses, 
 good and bad, social and selfish, and it puts him under 
 certain restraints. He must not move his neighbour's 
 landmark, but on the whole he may do what he will 
 within his own. Life is a kind of game, in which each is 
 expected to play for his own hand, only he must play 
 according to rule. But some few centuries before our 
 era there emerged a very different conception of life and 
 duty. According to this conception life is not a game 
 to be played by man against man, or family against 
 family, or community against community. Life rests 
 on a secret, profound, yet exceedingly simple once 
 revealed, which dissipates all its difficulties, puts an end 
 to strife and sorrow, shows us the way of light, emancipa- 
 tion, and peace. The secret is to put off self-hood, and 
 merge ourselves in the life of others, of all living things, 
 perhaps of the universe, to ask for nothing, to be ready 
 to give everything. 
 
 " Full of hindrances is household life, a path defiled by passion, 
 free as the air is the life of him who has renounced all worldly 
 things." * 
 
 Such a man is in charity not only with all mankind, 
 but with all created things. 
 
 " And he lets his mind pervade one quarter of the world with 
 thoughts of love, and so the second, and so the third, and so the 
 fourth. And thus the whole wide world, above, below, around, 
 and everywhere, does he continue to pervade with heart of Love, 
 far reaching, grown great, and beyond measure. Just, Vasettha, 
 as a mighty trumpeter makes himself heard and that without 
 difficulty in all the four directions, even so of all things that 
 have shape and life, there is not one that he passes by or leaves 
 aside, but regards them all with mind set free, and deep, full love." * 
 
 How far this Buddhist conception is original and what 
 elements it may have derived from earlier Brahmanic 
 
 1 Buddhist Suttas, Sacred Books of the East, vol. xi. p. 187. 
 3 Ibid., p. 201.
 
 INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 teaching we need not here enquire. We may remark only 
 on the striking analogies in the doctrine of Lao Tse : " To 
 joy in conquest is to joy in the loss of human life." " Who- 
 soever humbleth himself shall be exalted, and whosoever 
 exalteth himself shall be abased." " I would return 
 good for good, I would also return good for evil. I 
 would likewise meet suspicion with confidence." x We 
 may think also of the doctrine of equal universal benevo- 
 lence upheld by the philosopher Mih against the protests 
 of the classical moralists as evidence that wherever or 
 whenever these conceptions originated they took root in 
 China as well as in India. Spreading West they inspired 
 various ethical and religious disciplines, and received one 
 of their noblest expressions in the Christianity of the 
 Gospels. 3 
 
 Vary as it may in detail and in the cosmological ideas 
 associated with it, the doctrine of the selfless life is one, 
 and easily recognizable in all its expressions. Its promul- 
 gation constitutes the one really great epoch in moral 
 evolution, and is comparable in its effect to the Copernican 
 revolution in astronomy and the remodelling of scientific 
 method achieved in the period from Galileo to Newton. 
 No one who has ever entered at all into the spirit of 
 the teaching can see life again in quite the same light. 
 It is one of the revelations, like falling in love, or like 
 parenthood, each of which also puts life on a different 
 plane. Yet, with all its potency, the alleged simplicity 
 of the doctrine was a delusion. It has not been found 
 possible for men in the mass to live by it, and its recep- 
 tion as an orthodoxy has always been a disaster to the 
 creed. I would not deny that, now and again, we catch 
 a glimpse of it in our working life, and one or two of us 
 may have known a woman or even, rarer exception, a 
 man whose nature seems by some divine gift moulded 
 throughout on the lines of the selfless religion. But to 
 attract numbers, and keep them, the teachers and the 
 
 1 The Path of Virtue, Tr. by Old, chaps, xxii, xxxi, and xlix. 
 1 And let us add, for the sake of justice, in the Pauline account 
 of charity.
 
 i 4 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 Churches have striven in vain by asceticisms and brother- 
 hoods, disciplines and charities. They could enforce 
 the rules, but not breathe the spirit into the mass. 1 
 Here is the main root of that divided allegiance of which 
 we have spoken. For all Christian communities the 
 laws of God and of man fall asunder and the patchwork 
 compromises are so often threadbare that we are driven 
 to wonder whether the franker Paganism did not gain 
 in honesty what it lost in idealism. But the real trouble 
 lies deeper even than the difficulty of forcing too lofty a 
 creed on imperfect mankind. The doctrine itself is only 
 one-half of the truth, and, if the Western world has some 
 hold of the complementary half, the means of fitting 
 them together are still to seek. For the Eastern doctrine 
 in itself tends to quietism and resignation, and the truth 
 that the West has discovered a truth originating perhaps 
 with the Greeks, but revived with new meaning in modern 
 times points in the most opposite direction. For collec- 
 tive mankind resignation is not a duty, but a coward's 
 plea. Its duty is not to do the will of the gods, but to 
 refashion the world to its own will, whereto, so far as 
 concerns material things, it is slowly finding out the 
 
 * The conversion of the Empire was a pyrrhic victory for 
 Christianity. How was communism to be reconciled with pro- 
 perty, " take no thought for the morrow " with industry and thrift, 
 non-resistance with the law courts and, above all, with war, the 
 prohibition of oaths with judicial procedure, and so forth ? On 
 some points the Church put up a fight, e.g. at one period it actually 
 secured the suspension of the death penalty, and on the whole 
 it had its way (whether for good or ill) in the law of marriage and 
 divorce. But in the main the official churches adopted a question- 
 able form of compromise, maintaining their principles in the letter 
 while admitting ingenious devices for nullifying their application, 
 and thus introducing an element of sophistry into the public ethics 
 of the modern world which we do not find in antiquity. On the 
 other hand there have seldom been wanting small, unorthodox 
 bodies which have stood for the Christian ethics in their purity, 
 and the influence of these bodies has been great and sometimes 
 decisive. The whole subject has been discussed by Lecky, History 
 of European Morals, chap, iv, and in the present writer's Morals 
 in Evolution (3rd edition, p, 519),
 
 INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 way. Of the individual, it is true, the utmost sacrifice 
 may be demanded, but for a cause, not as an end in itself, 
 not to destroy individuality. On the contrary the demand 
 is pervading and universal, for rights, scope, the means 
 of expression, the conditions of happiness, whether for 
 the individual, the class, the sex, the nation, or the race. 
 For every human seed the fullness of its flower and fruit. 
 This is a creed not of resignation, but of assertion. The 
 danger is that becoming self-assertion, it may turn to 
 anarchy, and that is why, if we could but find the way, 
 it must be welded upon the old lore of the East. 
 
 In the meantime men find themselves in a new world 
 of vast possibilities and increasing power. They are 
 fired with new hopes, and impatient of old restraints. 
 Often they are tempted to trust to passion rather than 
 reason, and sometimes to rely more on force than on 
 justice. In the welter of new elements it is not wonderful 
 that it should be so. The world was not made in six 
 days, nor will it be remade in six generations, and mean- 
 while ideals will, if we may so put it, contend with as 
 much violence and as little scruple as persons. 
 
 But is there not, after all, a more excellent way ? Is 
 there not a method of bringing reason to bear on matters 
 practical and social as on matters physical and mathe- 
 matical ? In the world of thought there is a reality to 
 which preconceived opinion and rebellious emotion alike 
 must bow. When experiment and calculation have 
 spoken controversy is put to silence. Is there no corre- 
 sponding reality, no analogous method in the world of 
 practice, and of human values ? There is, it may be 
 said, this essential difference. The Reality of Science 
 recks nothing of human wishes and emotions. But the 
 values of human life are the objects of our wishes, and 
 form the very tissue of our emotions. They neither 
 subsist nor go forward like a planet in its orbit without 
 regard to the human will, but are made and unmade by 
 that will. They are what we would have them to be, 
 whereas the reality which science studies is what it is, 
 no. matter what we would jiaye it to be. Rational proof^
 
 16 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 then, is inapplicable to human ends. Feelings and 
 desires are not susceptible of truth and falsity, and there 
 is nothing to be proved or disproved about them. 
 
 Such is the first and most obvious retort to the claim 
 of Reason to govern the world of practice. But a little 
 consideration suggests some points at which the contrast 
 between theory and practice is overstated. Is the world 
 of Values to go to the central point so cor^ 
 shut off from the world of truth and reality as tf 
 assumes ? No one would deny that given a cert 
 the means employed to bring it about may be 
 will " really " succeed or " really " fail. No 
 deny that in this respect our judgments abo 1 m 
 
 may be true or false. But what of our ends when we 
 have gained them ? Do we not find that some are 
 " really " satisfying, and others " really " vain and 
 illusory, and if so, must we not admit that there is a 
 reality and an unreality in the world of our desire, and 
 a truth and falsity in our judgments as to what is good ? 
 Lastly, if A pursues an end which is very satisfactory to 
 him, but a crushing blow to B, is that end good as A 
 thinks, or bad as B considers ? Is there no court of 
 appeal, nothing to determine what is just and fair between 
 the parties ? A strong and persistent impulse if we 
 are to appeal only to impulses urges us to " see fair " 
 in such a case, and that means to find something which 
 is " really " right no matter what A and B may severa* 
 think. It looks, then, as though right and wrong rr 
 stand to the will much as true and false stand to 
 judgment. It would seem that they, too, claim a k 
 of validity which is regardless of any individual aberrat 
 If that is so we shall not be surprised if we find sometL , 
 analogous to the reason which determines what is tr 
 in the processes which establish what is right. 
 
 Whether these things are so is the question to be ask* 
 in this volume. We are concerned with the function 
 Reason in practical life. We shall enquire whetl 
 there is a Rational, and therefore a demonstrable, standard 
 of values to which the actions of man and the institutions
 
 INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 of society may be referred for judgment. If we find such 
 
 a standard, which we may call the Rational Good, we 
 
 shall have to ask in what sort of life inward and outward 
 
 is it realized, what authority and power does it possess 
 
 to dominate the actual conduct of men, and what light 
 
 4oes it throw on the relation between human aspirations 
 
 and the cosmjc processes among which the life of the 
 
 >?^r ( i^ numbered. These are all questions of the first 
 
 ,^es of Ethics and Religion. To apply such principles 
 
 ^-^ofial structure, which is the great need of our 
 
 P equires a systematic study of " axiomata media " 
 
 Concrete enquiry into the actual working of insti- 
 
 .jWhich cannot be attempted on this occasion. 
 
 1 ne co A mexion of wide generalities with particular facts 
 
 involves the establishment of many intervening links. 
 
 These facts must be left to the student of society and 
 
 the student of character. But it will be found in the 
 
 sequel that our principles involve, as all substantial 
 
 propositions must, the general rules and directions for 
 
 their application. 
 
 RU 
 
 9: 
 o ,
 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE SPRINGS OF ACTION 
 
 i. IN the world of turbid feeling and conflicting impulses 
 wherein active life moves and has its being, Reason is 
 a strange, an unbidden and often an unwelcome guest. 
 A philosophic theory may explain, but seldom guides the 
 actions of men. An ideal must usually be translated, 
 perhaps mistranslated, into a symbol ; it must be per- 
 sonified, perhaps mispersonified, in a leader, before it 
 will command the devotion of the multitude. Once 
 woven into habitual modes of feeling, once caught into 
 the web of daily effort and strife, once entangled in all 
 the associations of victory and defeat, satisfied ambition 
 or glow of resentment, it may gain a power to conjure 
 from the memories it evokes. It will seldom kindle and 
 sustain by its inherent force and value. The effective 
 rules of conduct are rather those which formulate what 
 men feel than those which tell them what they ought to 
 feel. Indeed, it was the master of thinkers who said 
 that bare thinking sets nothing moving. 
 
 In some directions no doubt the growth of applied 
 science has extended the sphere of reason in human affairs. 
 Yet in the world of mind, which might seem to be her 
 own domain, reason in these days seems sadly out of 
 fashion. Psychology, which begins to reduce the play of 
 mental activity to a science, has not fostered the con- 
 ception of conduct as a reasoned art. On the contrary, 
 
 19
 
 20 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 its tendency is to emphasize the primacy of feeling, the 
 sway of instinct, the prevalence of the irrational in the 
 mass movements of mankind. What is still more remark- 
 able, philosophy itself, once the appointed guardian and 
 advocate of reason, shares in the irrationalist tendency. 
 We shall end by denning man as the irrational animal, 
 and the modern philosopher as his prophet. 
 
 2. So far as psychology is concerned the emphasis on 
 the irrational is easy to understand. When men first 
 reflect upon their behaviour they naturally start with 
 things of which they are fully conscious. If I am asked 
 why I do this or that, my answer is given in terms of 
 an End. If I cannot state the end clearly I seem to 
 myself rather foolish, and to my neighbour, perhaps, 
 insincere. So axiomatic does it seem that to use the 
 Greek phrase everything is done for the sake of the 
 apparent good that is to come from it. But to Psychology 
 this mode of explanation will often seem very superficial. 
 Going behind the ordinary consciousness, psychology is 
 very largely concerned in distinguishing the forces operating 
 in the twilight of semi-consciousness, if not in the dark 
 of the unconscious, upon which our purposes depend, 
 and, since new discoveries are very like new toys, it is 
 not surprising if some psychologists, in their delight 
 with the forces that they have laid bare, make of these 
 the whole of mind, and, while elevating impulse and 
 emotion to the highest place, regard reason and will as 
 superficial conceptions. On this way of thinking the 
 reasons that we give for action are merely ex post facto 
 formulae for the impulses and emotions that really prompt 
 the act. The impulses are not based upon the reasons 
 but the reasons on the impulses. A man may think 
 that he loves a woman because she is beautiful, but in 
 reality she is beautiful to him because he loves her. He 
 says, and even believes, that he resents another's claim 
 because it is wrong. In reality he finds it wrong because 
 he resents it. He does this or abstains from that in 
 conscious obedience to the will of God. In reality the 
 effective will of God is the expression of impulses, within
 
 THE SPRINGS OF ACTION 21 
 
 himself, as modified by social traditions reposing in the 
 last resort on cognate impulses in the minds of other 
 men. From this last case it appears that not only does 
 a man's personal account of his personal nature rest on 
 his personal impulses, but social theories, traditional 
 beliefs, ancestral customs, and new departures spring, 
 not from the reasons given for them, but from impulses, 
 permanent or transitory, of mankind. Thus, a com- 
 pletely new mode of explaining social institutions arises. 
 When it was first discovered that many " primitive " 
 peoples buried food and implements, perhaps horse and 
 wife into the bargain, with a dead chieftain, the interpre- 
 tation was, very naturally, that they believed the dead 
 man to enjoy a continued existence very similar to his 
 life on earth, and they buried with him all that he would 
 most need in the future state. What had to be explained 
 on this view was the genesis of the belief. That being 
 given, the funeral practices would follow. But the 
 psychological methods that we are considering tend to 
 reverse the order. They suggest that certain emotions 
 about the dead, a strange blend of fear, regret, and affec- 
 tion, prompted the offerings, and the theory came in 
 afterwards as an explanation. In the Banks Islands they 
 place a piece of banana trunk on the bosom of a dead 
 mother. This is to deceive her ghost, which would 
 otherwise carry off the living child. Could even the 
 Banks Islander be so childish as to cheat himself with 
 this reasoning if he were really moved by reasoning 
 alone ? The truth is that a powerful sentiment urges 
 him to give the dead woman that which she most cherishes. 
 A still more powerful sentiment bids him save the baby. 
 Between the two he devises a compromise of make-believe, 
 all in logical terms, but full of inconsistencies. The 
 mother remains alive enough to desire her baby, but not 
 intelligent enough to distinguish between the baby and 
 a piece of wood. The compromise could deceive no one, 
 however savage, if he had not made up his mind to be 
 deceived. Now the cruder self-deceptions may be only 
 possible at the lower stages, but, fundamentally, the
 
 22 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 same relation between impulse, emotion, desire on the 
 one side, and explicit purposes, ideals and principles 
 upon the other, holds for all stages of development. The 
 wicked do not at bottom fear hell, but live in a hell of 
 fear. We do not punish criminals because punishment 
 is just, but because we hate or fear them, and out of our 
 hatreds and fears we weave a system of ideas in which, 
 as though on impersonal and impartial principles, suffering 
 is attached to wrong-doing. Our ethical and social 
 principles are in the same case. The French philosophers 
 announce the rights of man, as so many abstract principles 
 founded on reason and applicable at all times and places 
 to all mankind. In reality they formulated the resent- 
 ment of the French bourgeoisie against aristocratic 
 privilege and monarchical misrule. To the English 
 Utilitarian democracy which he formulated as a logical 
 deduction from principles of ethics and psychology 
 meant, in fact, the supremacy of his own middle class, 
 and Liberty meant the plenitude of opportunity for its 
 commercial ambitions. So we might go on with the 
 religious, ethical, or social principles that the world has 
 known. The whole may be summed up in this way. 
 At bottom man is moved, not by ideas or principles, 
 but by impulses and emotions, or to put them into a 
 compound term since they are so closely allied by 
 impulse-feeling. But he is influenced not only directly 
 but in many subtle ways by the impulse-feeling of others, 
 and he has to give and receive an account of what he 
 does and what they do. Hence he formulates his impulses 
 into ends, and explains them by reasons which are 
 mutually intelligible. This explanation has a use of its 
 own. It serves intercommunication and mutual under- 
 standing. But in the order of causation it arises ex post 
 facto. The real cause, whether of the personal act or 
 the social custom, or the ethical principle, lies in impulse- 
 feeling. To treat the alleged reason as the true ground 
 is the fallacy of intellectualism. 
 
 In fact it would seem, on this view, that man is not 
 precisely the irrational animal as suggested above. Still
 
 THE SPRINGS OF ACTION 23 
 
 less is he the rational animal of his own philosophy. We 
 might describe him rather as the would-be rational 
 animal. Among his other impulses he owns this curiosity 
 among desires the desire to explain himself to himself 
 and others. Acting under this impulse he forms theories 
 of " life and action," and, taking these theories seriously, 
 he becomes an intellectualist. In reality reason, intellect, 
 perhaps consciousness itself, are only " epiphenomena." 
 They are the fly upon the wheel which in reality revolves 
 on the hub of emotion, or rather of still deeper, perhaps 
 purely physical, forces, which for some unintelligible 
 reason have felt emotion as their concomitant a useless 
 concomitant, functionless, an effect, but not a cause, 
 a fly upon the wheel. 
 
 3. With the ultimate questions of causation involved 
 I cannot deal here. I must assume in general terms that 
 the life of mind has a true meaning and function, that 
 it is not merely an effect of bodily movements or their 
 projection, as it were, upon another plane, but takes 
 part in them, and through them makes itself effective 
 in the world. 1 But if that is assumed, the question of 
 the true relation between the unconscious and the con- 
 scious, the emotional and the rational, impulse and idea, 
 still remains, and the question will run all through our 
 enquiry. Clearly, it is fruitless to speak of a Logic of 
 Practice if there can be no practical significance in logic. 
 What may be remarked as a preliminary is that, of the 
 examples chosen above, the reader will probably have 
 found some much more convincing than others. Thus, 
 to take the very first, love is proverbial for its blindness, 
 and for its power of endowing the loved object with all 
 lovable qualities. This is perhaps the strongest case for 
 the theory that the emotion creates its own excuse. But 
 even Love may, tragically, have its eyes opened. It 
 could not be maintained that faults never appear till 
 
 1 For a thoroughgoing defence of this view see Dr. McDougall's 
 Body and Mind. In excuse for my omission here I may be allowed 
 to refer to my Mind in Evolution, chap, ii, and Development and 
 Purpose, Part II, chap. iv.
 
 24 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 love is dead. It must be allowed that it is the blemish 
 that sometimes gives it its mortal wound. Take next, 
 resentment. If our anger seeks justification, is it not 
 equally true that to be required to state our case has 
 its effect upon our anger ? When we lay it before another 
 in plain language are we not forced to make some dis- 
 tinction between our personal sources of irritation and 
 the offence which will be recognized as such by an impartial 
 man, and would it be questioned that the judgment of 
 our neighbour has its effect, if not on the emotion itself, 
 at any rate upon its practical expression ? Grant, for 
 the sake of argument, that legal punishments originate 
 from emotions of blinded indignation and fear. The 
 fact remains that, as they stand, they constitute a penal 
 code formulated in abstract terms, defining impersonally 
 the crimes for which they are due, the procedure by which 
 guilt is to be ascertained, and so forth. There is a long 
 interval between the penalty so inflicted and the direct 
 emotional expression of resentment by an injured man, 
 and that interval is occupied by processes of deliberation, 
 discussion, comparison, by considerations of public 
 interest, by reflective notions of justice, responsibility 
 and desert. It may be said that, if we take away the 
 primitive emotion, all this legal mechanism would be as 
 powerless as the cold gun without the powder. Maybe, 
 but without law and morals the emotion would be as 
 ill-directed as the powder without the gun. There are 
 two elements in human action, and they are necessary 
 to one another. Whether idea or impulse comes first 
 may be difficult in a specific case to determine, but, 
 whichever comes first, both in the end are equally essential 
 to the developed purpose. It may well be that some 
 sentiment about the dead first prompted funeral gifts. 
 But they could never have assumed their elaborate 
 
 1 Whether it be fear or love. It looks as though the burning, 
 burial or destruction of the dead man's belongings were prompted, 
 at the lowest stage, by a kind of dread expressed, in the first degree 
 of reflection, in the magical conception of a death infection. The 
 kindlier feeling is perhaps later.
 
 THE SPRINGS OF ACTION 25 
 
 development including sometimes the sacrifices of slaves, 
 and even of the widow, at the grave but from the positive 
 and articulate belief in survival. Nor would this belief 
 have arisen out of the sentiment alone if it had not been 
 favoured by the intellectual situation. The belief in 
 continuity is founded on a very simple logic, and, for the 
 simpler peoples, obtained some corroboration from dreams 
 and an easy explanation from the animistic conception of 
 soul and body. In fact, when this conception is shattered, 
 the practices are changed and reduced to a shadow of 
 themselves. Often we can clearly see that it is the 
 belief which causes practices that probe the very depths 
 of human emotional capacity. Take the case of human 
 sacrifice. Are we to attribute this to a direct delight in 
 cruelty, or even negatively to a special callousness in 
 savage peoples ? There is not the smallest reason to 
 regard agriculturists as inherently more callous than 
 other men. On the contrary, the manners of a settled 
 agricultural people are in general milder, if anything, 
 than those of the herdsman and the hunter. But the 
 overwhelming majority of cases of human sacrifice are 
 found among agricultural peoples of the second and third 
 stages, and the reason is simply the widespread belief, 
 of magical origin, in the influence of a human victim upon 
 the crops. We cannot suppose that our ancestors, in 
 the period of religious persecutions, suddenly acquired 
 an increment of natural cruelty which they lost again 
 when the persecutions ceased. These appalling cruelties 
 began when heresy arose, under the influence of the belief 
 that heresy put all men who might be influenced by it 
 in jeopardy of eternal suffering. When this belief began 
 to be weakened heretics were no longer burnt. Un- 
 doubtedly the psychologist will trace many unavowed 
 emotional elements in the work of the inquisitor. In 
 particular he will realize that it is the inquisitor's own 
 fear which points his zeal. In exterminating the doubter 
 he hopes vaguely to extinguish the doubt. Nevertheless 
 the belief is in the governing fact. The fanatic would 
 not experience these particular fears in this marked degree
 
 26 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 if his imagination had not painted an unjust God in the 
 image of a Philip II. Still less would he have been able 
 to persuade the balanced, moderate man to join with 
 him in burning noble men and women of pure lives had 
 not one and all been in intellectual agreement on their 
 theory of the universe. 
 
 4. To this the reply may be that, however influential 
 the conception of God, of the future life, of the universe 
 and man's place in it may be, the conception itself rests 
 on human emotions, and expresses the character of a 
 race, an age, an epoch in civilization. Civilized people 
 do not tolerate a Moloch. The story of Isaac embodies 
 the memory of the abolition of human sacrifice under 
 the influence of a dawning humanity. Plato, with all 
 his respect for the traditional religion, has to urge a 
 purgation of the Homeric Olympus. Christian doctrine 
 rightly placed Charity above Faith, and, if men in general 
 had been in their heart as in their profession Christians, 
 they would never have acquiesced in a conception of 
 Deity which necessitated persecution. Indeed, as manners 
 grew milder they revolted against it. Thus, if it is con- 
 ceded that theory influences practice, it will only be on 
 the understanding that theory is itself determined by 
 character. But this objection only allows a part of the 
 truth. When God has become the ideal of goodness 
 a position only reached at an advanced stage of religious 
 development it would certainly seem that the character 
 attributed to God must reflect the essential elements of 
 perfection as conceived by man. But to frame a consistent 
 ideal of perfection is itself as much an intellectual as a 
 moral effort, and to reconcile perfect goodness of will 
 with the possession of disposing power over the universe 
 is emphatically a problem for the intelligence, and one 
 which it could not, in fact, solve. The God of Christianity 
 was encumbered from the first with remnants of the 
 Old Testament tradition which to this day are quoted 
 as an excuse for vicarious punishment and it was difficult 
 to get rid of these inconsistencies without shaking the 
 authority of tradition. What was more serious was
 
 THE SPRINGS OF ACTION 27 
 
 that to meet purely intellectual needs God was the 
 creator of all things and the disposer of the eternal 
 destinies of men. Hence all the problems of the origin 
 of evil, of free will, desert, grace, and predestination, 
 problems of intellectual origin that could neither be solved 
 nor even discussed without raising acute moral questions. 
 
 To take an illustration from quite another part of our 
 field, how great has been the influence of biological 
 investigation on modern social theory. The conception 
 of natural selection and the struggle for existence has 
 been used at one time to justify competition and obstruct 
 the growing sense of collective responsibility, at another 
 to justify war and conquest, and silence the claims of 
 personal liberty and international right. Clear thinking 
 is every whit as necessary as right feeling to the discussion 
 of the moral issues raised by such theories. It is perfectly 
 true that they owe their ready acceptance to a favourable 
 emotional prepossession. It is quite easy to understand 
 why some of the modern Eugenic arguments are popular 
 among the classes that are fortunately circumstanced 
 and can barely obtain a hearing from the " bottom dog." 
 But though the desires and emotions of men account for 
 the popularity or unpopularity of social theories they 
 do not account for the theories themselves. These arise 
 out of the intellectual situation, just as the prevalent 
 attitude towards them arises out of the emotional situa- 
 tion, and, like all theories, they have in the end to run 
 the racket of logical and evidential tests. It would, 
 I admit, be too much to say that a popular theory may 
 be killed instantaneously by disproof. It dies hard, or 
 rather undergoes a process of evanescence, fading away 
 first from the discourse of educated and intelligent men, 
 becoming a mark of ignorance, of simplicity, and so by 
 stages dissolving into oblivion while quicker minds are 
 busied in finding a substitute. 
 
 Theories, then, exert a real directive influence, and 
 theories have their main root in the intellectual world 
 in the state of knowledge, the level of intellectual clarity, 
 the mode in which men conceive the problems of life
 
 28 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 and society. The critic of intellectualism can see the 
 point quite clearly when the deficiencies of theory are 
 in question. He will show how the abstraction of natural 
 rights or of popular sovereignty justified some of the 
 worst mistakes and excesses of the French Revolution, 
 how ideas of Liberty and Equality overshadowed the 
 structure of the American Constitution, how weaknesses 
 in Bentham or in Cobden vitiated much of the work of 
 English Liberalism. Admitting that theories may be 
 influential for evil he does not recognize that they can 
 be influential for good. Yet his whole criticism is an 
 unwitting testimony to the importance of well-reasoned 
 ideals. If defects in the theories of Rousseau or Bentham 
 are seriously chargeable with certain bad results in practice, 
 it follows that, if these mistakes had been corrected in 
 good time by a better way, those ill results would have 
 been avoided. On the whole question of the real influence 
 of social theories and I would associate religious ideals 
 with them for this purpose we ought, I would contend, 
 to keep an open mind and look to careful historical and 
 comparative investigation rather than to theories of 
 human motive alone to give us the answer. The historic 
 fortunes of ideals, what has actually determined their 
 growth, what real influence they have exerted upon 
 events, how far they have been merely an intellectualized 
 version of some process that was going on, and would 
 have gone on to the end, without them, how far they 
 have really been effective in altering the face of society 
 these are questions on which, within certain limits, 
 general psychology leaves us with an open mind. It 
 indicates several highly interesting possibilities, and it 
 is the fascinating, though exceeding difficult, task of 
 sociology to determine in each case which possibility ha.s 
 been realized. Was the Stoic philosophy, for example, 
 a real force in the remodelling of Roman jurisprudence, 
 or did it merely furnish a convenient formula for changes 
 necessitated by an expanding civilization, and the needs 
 of a cosmopolitan empire ? If the mere needs were the 
 primary causes of change, would they have been so clearly
 
 THE SPRINGS OF ACTION 29 
 
 felt, or the lines of solution so readily discoverable without 
 the aid of the larger principles which the philosophy 
 furnished ? How far, again, in the fourth and fifth cen- 
 turies was Christianity the conqueror or the conquered ? 
 Was the world Christianized at bottom, or the Church 
 paganized ? How far, in modern times, were the theories 
 to which we have alluded above merely a reflection of 
 popular movements in the minds of bookish men ? How 
 far was there an interaction between theory and event, 
 and would a more adequate theory have had practical 
 effect in giving increased coherence to the impulses of 
 men ? These are questions to which, I think, the concrete 
 answer must be supplied in each case by the social 
 historian trained in psychological analysis. As we proceed 
 we shall see, in general, something of what theory can 
 and of what it cannot do, and for our present purpose 
 these generalities will have to suffice. 
 
 5. One thing we can, in fact, see emerging from the 
 considerations already reviewed. Much of the prejudice 
 against reason is due to a misconception for which its 
 friends are as much responsible as its enemies. By both 
 alike reason is often taken as a thing apart. On the 
 side of knowledge it is divorced from experience, on the 
 side of conduct from feeling. In both cases the divorce 
 is fatal to a true understanding. In regard to conduct 
 the " practical Reason " is not a faculty which sits aloft, 
 issuing impotent orders to a refractory multitude of 
 impulses and emotions. It is not a faculty concerned 
 with a system of abstract truths deducible, like so many 
 mathematical formulae, from first principles that have 
 nothing to do with human feeling. It is rather a general 
 expression for something which careful analysis reveals 
 in permanent operation within the emotional field. The 
 stupidest human being outside an idiot asylum is not 
 guided by pure impulse alone. With greater or less 
 clearness he realizes what he is about, he has an idea of 
 his immediate end, he can follow the concatenation of 
 ends and means, and he can weigh the advantages and 
 disadvantages of one end against another. Irrational as
 
 30 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 the average life may seem when tested by comparison 
 with some all-embracing, self-consistent principle of 
 conduct, it is orderly when compared with the chaos 
 of spluttering impulses which would remain if the element 
 of reason were once for all abstracted. If a man has no 
 dominating purpose or creed that effectively directs his 
 life as a whole, he has as a rule threads and filaments of 
 purpose running through and connecting branches of 
 his conduct. He has probably his trade or profession, 
 his family life and affections, his hobbies, his house and 
 possessions ; each of these gives a certain order and 
 consecutiveness to his conduct, and renders it so far 
 purposive, continuous, and rational. The total result, 
 it is true, may be a patchwork rather than a pattern, 
 and the colours may not always match. One hand may 
 undo the work of the other, and the contrasts of character 
 presented by the same being in different relations may 
 be a legitimate theme of satire ; but it is fair to judge 
 in the end not only by failures, but by successes, not 
 only by things done ill, but by ill-doings avoided. There 
 are elements of order, of restraint, of consecutive purpose 
 in the ordinary life, and the starting point of ratiocination 
 is the conception that these elements are the partial and 
 imperfect incarnations of a purpose which is comprehen- 
 sive, self -consistent, and complete. The threads which 
 string together portions of human conduct are what a 
 thinker, who was no rationalist, called organic filaments. 
 They are shreds from the tissue of a higher organism, 
 which it is the problem of reason to apprehend in its 
 wholeness. 
 
 6. The view thus suggested of the place of thought 
 in general, and of rational thought in particular, in 
 ordinary workaday life, is filled in and justified when 
 we turn to comparative Psychology. The further we go 
 into questions of origin and development the less we 
 shall be disposed to admit the abstract and absolute 
 separatioh of the worlds of thought and feeling. On 
 the contrary, the evidence goes to show that intelligence 
 takes its rise within the sphere of impulse, and has for
 
 THE SPRINGS OF ACTION 31 
 
 its first function to define the direction of impulse, and 
 shape it to a foreseen End. Impulse, informed by a 
 definite idea of an End, becomes Purpose, and Purpose 
 is at least the beginning of rationality in action. The 
 relation between reason and impulse is fundamental to 
 our enquiry, and as a preliminary to it let us remark 
 here that the evolutionary view of purpose is essential 
 to a just understanding of the controversy between the 
 intellectualist and his opponent. For it traces impulse 
 to deep-seated > conditions of life, and finds for it far- 
 reaching functions in which the interest of the moment 
 is only a fleeting phase. But it may be only this interest 
 that is formulated into a clear purpose. The significance 
 of the act to the agent may then be only a very small 
 part of its significance as understood by the psychologist 
 who traces it to causes of which the agent is unaware 
 and knows that it performs a function which the agent 
 does not grasp. At this point the psychologist is tempted 
 to maintain that the act is irrational unless the reasons 
 which he sees for it are also those which the agent sees. 
 But this is an arbitrary requirement. The truer inference 
 is that the sphere of intelligence we will not here say 
 " reason " in action varies in extent as the bearing 
 and significance of the act is more or less clearly and fully 
 understood. It is fallacious to attribute to every agent 
 a full understanding of all the logical implications of all 
 that he does. It is equally fallacious to maintain that 
 he understands nothing on the ground that he does not 
 understand everything. 
 
 To take a simple instance. A mother nurses her 
 querulous baby to sleep. The plain man regards her 
 action as purposive and intelligent. She loves the child, 
 cannot bear to see it fret, knows how to quiet it, and does 
 so. The ease of the child is her direct purpose, and so 
 she herself would say. The psychologist descends upon 
 the plain man, and the mother alike with the intellectualist 
 fallacy. For him her action is instinctive and emotional. 
 It is the impulsive outcome of the maternal feeling 
 nourished through ages of selection as a means of securing
 
 32 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 maternal care for the helpless young. It is rooted in a 
 hereditary mechanism. The embraces and caresses by 
 which it is effected are the instinctive, almost reflex, 
 responses fixed by the inherited machine, and its signifi- 
 cance is seen in the importance of maternal care to the 
 life of the species. Of all this the mother, as mother, 
 recks nothing. She is thinking only of the child and its 
 immediate comfort. She is acting, then, not from reason, 
 but from impulse. But this account is really the intel- 
 lectualist fallacy itself, turned inside out. The mother 
 is not concerned with all the causes that have made her 
 what she is, nor with all the effects which will flow from 
 her actions. But those causes have made her an intelli- 
 gent being with a certain area of purpose, within which 
 she consciously adopts whatever means she finds best 
 suited within that area. If it is an intellectualist fallacy 
 to say that she acts from a conscious sense of the func- 
 tions of motherhood, it is another form of the same fallacy 
 since it assumes that what is rational in action must 
 be deduced from abstract principles, independent of 
 impulse-feeling to maintain that, unless she does so, 
 she is acting by pure impulse. The simple truth in that 
 case lies with the " plain man." The mother acts intelli- 
 gently for the purpose that she has in view, not on the 
 theory which psychologists may frame about the origin 
 or signification of such purposes. 
 
 We may apply a similar analysis to the rise of social 
 institutions. History will often show that institutions 
 which play some important part in natural life, and look 
 as if they had been designed for that part, never were 
 designed at all. They grew into their mature shape 
 " from precedent to precedent," each change being 
 prompted, not by any general principle, but by the 
 requirements of some particular situation. If that is so, 
 there is, at each stage, no consciousness of the remote 
 and comprehensive end towards which, as we see on 
 looking back, the society is actually tending, and to 
 impute consciousness of the end without direct evidence 
 would be an intellectualist fallacy. But there is conscious-
 
 THE SPRINGS OF ACTION 33 
 
 ness at each stage of the immediate concrete or practical 
 end, and to deny this would be the reverse form of the 
 same fallacy. If it is often true that men have built 
 better than they knew, the just analysis of the case is 
 that, though they were not guided by a conception of 
 the fabric as a whole, they were well aware of what they 
 were doing as they added each brick. 
 
 7. It is not too much to say that the conception of 
 purpose as valid and genuine in spite of limitation is 
 vital to the analysis of reason, and to the whole interpre- 
 tation of mental and social development. The lower 
 forms of action generally serve functions which the 
 spectator can recognize as useful to the organism or the 
 stock, but are not determined by any idea of that utility. 
 We cough not because we are aware that it is desirable 
 to expel a foreign body from the windpipe, but because 
 a crumb touches off a machinery which effects a violent 
 expiration. Again, a dog eats, not that it may sustain 
 life, but because it is hungry. But here, even at this 
 low stage, the underlying impulses which do in fact tend 
 to sustain life begin to force themselves up into conscious- 
 ness. When the dog begs for a biscuit, or the cat runs 
 after the person who is carrying a saucer, it is at least 
 a tenable (if disputed) view that it anticipates this particular 
 meal, is guided by its anticipation, and adopts accordingly 
 the behaviour which on such occasions it has found to 
 yield the required result. Thus, hunger, a feeling based 
 on bodily structure and subservient to vital needs of 
 the race, stimulates in consciousness the anticipation of 
 a certain definite end. That end does not include all 
 the implications which the biologist sees in it. It is very 
 limited and narrow, but within its limits it directs action. 
 Conscious purpose emerges from needs lying below the 
 threshold, but it is none the less purpose, and conscious. 
 Were it otherwise there would be no conscious purpose 
 unless or until we could stand entirely apart from our 
 hereditary nature. 
 
 But, it may be said, it is not awareness of the end 
 that is in question, but control of the impulse. The
 
 34 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 irrationalist will admit that, with varying degrees of 
 clearness and comprehension, we know what we are about, 
 but he regards this knowledge as a mere " epiphenomenon." 
 The driving force is still impulse, and our knowledge of 
 its direction neither adds to its energy nor subtracts 
 from it. But if knowledge adds nothing to impulse it 
 does materially affect its execution. Between an impulse 
 acting blindly and the same impulse executing itself on 
 an intelligent plan there will be a world of difference in 
 the actual effect upon behaviour. If this is too obvious 
 to be questioned the reply will be that intelligence may 
 dictate the means to an end, but not the end itself. In 
 assigning a purpose we give a reason for the use of this 
 or that means, but what is the reason of the purpose 
 itself ? Is there any but its foundation in feeling or 
 impulse, which (it will be said) is no reason, but a blunt 
 psychological fact ? To deal with this objection we 
 must decide what reason in matters of conduct means, 
 and that is our main question. But we must remark 
 at once that as life proceeds and intelligence expands 
 there is a transformation not merely of the means by 
 which impulses achieve their satisfaction, but, to all 
 appearance, of impulses themselves. Particular impulses 
 are fitted into a larger scheme, and what is more, are 
 modified or even suppressed in order to fit the scheme. 
 
 Take the case of maternal love again. The animal 
 mother has the impulse to feed and tend the young, 
 and protect it from an apparent danger, and it is at least 
 a tenable view that in so doing she can on occasion act 
 with some intelligence. It is a tenable view that the 
 hen-bird that goes to find a worm and brings it in to the 
 peeping nestling is not merely prompted from moment 
 to moment by a series of impulses, but by the purpose of 
 filling the yellow beak. However this may be in the 
 case of the bird, it is quite easy to understand that there 
 is a stage of intelligence at which the purpose of feeding 
 the young when hungry, may be formed without any 
 clear conception of the good of the young as a being 
 who is to live and grow, and whose permanent welfare
 
 THE SPRINGS OF ACTION 35 
 
 should govern every temporary service. Now the human 
 mother certainly can and does form this wider conception. 
 For her the temporary service becomes either a means 
 or a constituent element in this wider end, and the wider 
 end governs the narrower. Her impulse to gratify the 
 child may be over-ruled by the advice of the doctor ; 
 her desire to soothe it may, if it is ill-tempered, be post- 
 poned to considerations of discipline. Her passing 
 impulses are transformed into an abiding love ; her 
 temporary and occasional services, each with its own 
 immediate purpose, become elements in a more permanent, 
 more comprehensive, purpose. Her action as a whole 
 is still based on feeling, and the feeling, if you will, is of 
 instinctive character, but it also involves a wider con- 
 sciousness, a more reflective consideration of the nature 
 and bearing of her actions, an increased capacity of 
 inhibiting immediate impulse, and guiding the behaviour 
 of the moment by ideas of permanent value. Finally, 
 if a woman, capable of all the wealth of maternal feeling, 
 knows herself to be the victim of some fell hereditary 
 disease, and on that ground renounces the hope of 
 motherhood altogether, a deliberate consideration of good 
 and evil results overcomes in her the whole prompting of 
 instinct, and if her renunciation is still based on feeling it 
 is a form of feeling which reflection alone makes possible. 
 To all this the retort will doubtless be that we are 
 labouring the obvious and omitting the essential. No 
 one questions (it will be said) that impulses may be con- 
 trolled, but they are controlled not by reason, but by 
 other impulses that happen to conflict with them. In 
 the last analysis all that " reflection," or anything that 
 we can call reasoning, does is to trace out consequences 
 which show the bearing of one impulse on another. It 
 thus multiplies points of contact, and therefore of possible 
 conflict. But the conflict once joined, the victory is to 
 the strong. The most forceful impulse prevails, and the 
 force of an impulse is something which we may feel, but 
 which we do not alter by reasoning about it. To test this 
 account we must enquire further into the meaning of "im- 
 pulse," the function of feeling, and the nature of control.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 IMPULSE AND CONTROL 
 
 i. THE term impulse has a wider and a narrower 
 signification. In its narrower sense it is opposed to 
 purpose. An impulsive action, e.g. a blow or a threat- 
 ening gesture made in sudden anger, has a definite direction 
 or tendency, e.g. the injury or intimidation of the 
 antagonist. But it does not involve thought. It does 
 not wait for the formation of an idea of its own outcome. 
 On the contrary, the impulsive man acts first and thinks 
 afterwards. But though in impulsive action we do not 
 think we seem always to feel, e.g. in our illustration we 
 feel the hot emotion of anger, and the feeling among 
 other things distinguishes impulsive action from the 
 mechanical reflex. Moreover the element of feeling 
 persists all along the line, and its changes of tone affect 
 the impulse. Thus, if the blow gets home it is probable 
 that the emotion cools down and no further impulse is 
 formed. On the other hand, if the emotion remains the 
 impulse continues. The correlation is so close that we 
 might be tempted to identify them, but we soon discover 
 discrepancies. Thus extreme emotion tends to paralyse 
 impulse, while swift and effective impulse seems (to put 
 it paradoxically) to satisfy emotion before it is fully 
 excited. Furthermore, if the impulse does not satisfy 
 the feeling it may be suspended or reversed. When the 
 timid creature who cannot escape pursuit turns to bay, 
 the flight impulse is discarded as an unfaithful servant, 
 and fear itself elects to fight. Feeling and impulse, 
 though doubtless rooted in the same fundamental suscep- 
 
 36
 
 IMPULSE AND CONTROL 37 
 
 tibilities and requirements, are distinct branches on the 
 stem, and do not operate on the same lines or on identical 
 conditions. We can best understand their relations by 
 considering the conditions of their development. 
 
 2. According to the general evolutionary theory, the 
 structure of an organism grows up under the conditions 
 of the struggle for existence. That is to say, organs 
 useful not only to the individual, but to the stock in that 
 struggle tend to be preserved, and therefore to develop, 
 while organs that are useless or injurious tend to atrophy 
 and disappear. What is true of physical organs will 
 also be true of psychological functions, in as far as 
 psychological functions determine the behaviour of any 
 organism. Whatever in an organism tends to govern its 
 action in relation to its environment must have its effect 
 upon the fortunes of the organism and upon the question 
 whether it will survive and perpetuate its stock. Thus 
 in all the lower ranges of life survival value to the stock 
 is the governing condition upon which the perpetuation 
 of a mode of action depends, and this applies to the 
 psychological just as much as to the physical basis of 
 such action. Some hereditary modes of action seem to 
 be purely mechanical, like the knee-jerk or the narrowing 
 of the pupil in bright light. Others are impulsive in 
 character, devoid of foresight, but informed with feeling 
 and a certain awareness of the objects which excite them. 
 Such are the reactions of anger or fear. Whether such 
 hereditary impulses should as a class be called instincts, 
 or whether the term should be reserved for certain sub- 
 classes need not be discussed here. Nor need we go into 
 the difficult questions of the psychology of instinct. We 
 must, however, note that some hereditary impulses are 
 very definite and difficult to modify. They work with 
 great precision as long as conditions are favourable, but 
 have little power of adapting themselves to changes or 
 peculiarities of the environment. Such is the character 
 of many of the most remarkable instincts of insects. 1 
 
 1 Innumerable illustrations may be found in the writings of 
 Fabre and of Mr. and Mrs. Peckham (The Habits and Instincts
 
 38 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 Others, on the contrary, are plastic and variable. They 
 seem to require something to complete or define them, 
 and they certainly admit of modification. We have now 
 to ask how this modification arises. Far down in the 
 animal world we find indubitable evidence of individual 
 experience entering in as a factor. We find original 
 impulses checked or encouraged, as the case may be, by 
 experience of the results in which they issue, and on the 
 analogy of our own consciousness an analogy which 
 for our purpose we need not criticize with any detail 
 we interpret this experience as consisting in a pleasurable 
 or painful feeling pleasurable in the case in which the 
 impulse is encouraged, painful in the case where it is 
 inhibited. 1 The nature of the change may be best under- 
 
 of Solitary Wasps), Here is one. The egg of Chalicodoma is 
 laid in a sealed cell. When the grub hatches out it eats its way 
 through the cell wall into the outer world. Fabre set it a problem 
 by lining the cell wall with paper, but the grub ate through paper 
 and wall. He then varied the problem by leaving an interval 
 between the paper and the wall. This was too much for the larva. 
 It ate through the paper and then stopped. It was wound up 
 to eat once but not twice. It would, however, be a mistake to 
 infer that all the instincts of the Hymenoptera are of this mechanical 
 character. On many occasions they show remarkable powers of 
 varying their behaviour to suit special circumstances. The really 
 baffling thing about them is the intermixture of the apparently 
 mechanical with the apparently intelligent. Yet, after all, if they 
 could observe human behaviour they might be almost equally 
 bewildered by the intermingling of crass inertia with originality 
 and initiative. 
 
 1 It is usual to speak of feelings of pleasure or pain. But it 
 should be understood that pleasure is a character or tone common 
 to many feelings which in other respects are quite distinct. Thus, 
 there is a pleasure in feeling warm and also in the emotions of a 
 great success. The feelings are very different, but agree in the 
 tone of pleasure. If we call them feelings of pleasure that is merely 
 a linguistic variant for pleasurable feeling. It may be doubted 
 whether there is any feeling which could be accurately described 
 as a feeling of pleasure and nothing else, unless it be some dream- 
 like ecstasy in which all definiteness of content has vanished. Pain 
 on the other hand is used ambiguously, meaning sometimes the 
 feeling tone opposed to pleasure, sometimes certain substantive 
 states, aches, smarts, pricks, etc. Some psychologists on this
 
 IMPULSE AND CONTROL 39 
 
 stood from a well-known example. A newly-hatched 
 chick will peck indiscriminately, and with an approxima- 
 tion to accuracy, at all manner of small objects strewn 
 about on the ground. This pecking impulse is then 
 apparently inherited as part of the mechanism with which 
 the chick comes ready prepared to face the world. But 
 at this stage the chick will peck with equal avidity at 
 nutritious and innutritious objects. It will peck at grains 
 of corn, for example ; it will also peck at small pieces 
 of orange-peel. But there is a difference in the results. 
 When it pecks at the corn it swallows with avidity ; when 
 it pecks at the orange-peel it gives signs which we inter- 
 pret as signs of displeasure, wiping the bill, for example, 
 and rejecting the morsel ; and after a few experiences 
 
 ground object to the use of the term pain as the reverse of pleasure. 
 They lay stress on the point that the concrete pains are not always 
 wholly displeasurable, e.g. as counter-irritants or a relief from 
 boredom. Personally I confess to being satisfied with an extremely 
 moderate indulgence in this particular kind of satisfaction. In 
 general the pleasurableness or the reverse of a feeling depends 
 not only on its character but on its degree. Sweetness is pleasant, 
 and more and more pleasant to a point, beyond which it cloys 
 and rapidly becomes disgusting. There is an optimum point at 
 which the pleasure is at its highest. Th s is clearly true of sensory 
 pleasures, and it is on the whole true of emotions, though here 
 the optimum point is much nearer to the maximum of which our 
 feeling is capable. On the whole, however, I think the paradox 
 holds that our moderate joys are more pleasurable than our extreme 
 joys. How far does pain follow a similar curve ? A smart at 
 its lowest stage is little more than a titillation and may even be 
 momentarily agreeable, but it passes so rapidly into the opposite 
 character that we think of smarts, as such, as pains. The slight 
 ache of healthy fatigue is not unpleasant, but aches cannot set 
 in in earnest without being pains. Much the same may be said 
 of melancholy, grief, anger, fear. All these have a pleasurable 
 or at least a bitter-sweet phase, while their further developments 
 are painful in the extreme. It is pretty certain that both sensory 
 and emotional pain, like pleasure, have a maximum (which defeats 
 the ingenuity of torturers), and I incline to think that there is a 
 point in the intensity of the feeling from which the painful character 
 undergoes a decline. Whe.her emotional or sensorial pain seems 
 to involve some reaction of consciousness on feeling, some dis- 
 tinctness therefore between the feeling and the residual self. Now
 
 40 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 a single one is sometimes enough it learns to leave 
 the orange-psel severely alone. So the chick undergoes 
 a certain education, the broad effect of which is that its 
 diffused and undefined impulse to peck is modified in a 
 way which is very important for the future of the chick 
 itself. It is defined so that there remains only an impulse 
 to peck at certain things, while others are spontaneously 
 neglected. This experience we put down on grounds 
 which, as I say, we here assume to be sufficient, as con- 
 sisting essentially in feelings pleasurable or painful. We 
 assume, that is, that the chick finds the grain of corn 
 pleasant, and the orange-peel bitter and disagreeable. 
 Now, if we make this assumption, a consequence of 
 importance follows with regard to the nature of feeling. 
 We understand this consequence best if we ask first what 
 is the value biologically of this new power of the chicken 
 to learn from experience. The value lies in this, that 
 it enlarges the possible sphere of action. Organisms, 
 which are incapable of learning from experience, may 
 come into the world ready equipped with a structural 
 machinery which guides them with great precision within 
 a certain range. Outside that range they are at a loss 
 how to act, and, in point of fact, they perish for this reason 
 in large numbers, and the stock only maintains itself in 
 virtue of a very high birth-rate. But where learning 
 from experience becomes possible the instinct itself may 
 be more elastic. It may afford a basis for action in a 
 larger variety of circumstances, and if it does not guide 
 
 there seems to be a stage at which this distinctness is lost and the 
 feeling is for the time all reality " all things were transformed 
 into the agony I wore." At this stage the feeling is more like 
 an outer object and paradoxically is less felt, or more literally 
 is of diminishing painfulness. The next stage is of course the 
 confusion, deadening and final loss of consciousness and therefore 
 of feeling itself. 
 
 On this view popular usage calls pains feelings which, over 
 nearly the whole range of their intensity, have painful character. 
 I see no reason on account of this usage to expel pain from its use 
 in psychology as the opposite of pleasure, it being understood 
 that in psychological nomenclature both terms signify not feelings, 
 but tones of feeling.
 
 IMPULSE AND CONTROL 41 
 
 the creature so precisely from the first, it enables it to 
 be guided by its own experience of what is useful or 
 harmful, and so to govern its behaviour as its conditions 
 require in an extended sphere of action. But this salutary 
 result depends on one condition. Experience of pleasure 
 and pain can only aid in preserving the individual or 
 the stock if the pleasurable feelings are excited by actions 
 that are upon the whole beneficial, and painful feelings by 
 actions which are on the whole injurious. The conclusion, 
 then, to which our evolutionary account forces us is that, 
 just as impulse must on the whole be beneficial, so feeling 
 must on the whole run in channels tending to survival. 
 Two remarks must be subjoined here to avoid misunder- 
 standing. Pleasure, as we know in our own case, is not 
 always healthy, either from the point of view of the 
 individual or society. There may be bad pleasures, and 
 there may be pleasures which we deem good, but which 
 have no discernible bearing on survival e.g. the pleasures 
 of art. The reason of this is that survival- value is not 
 the cause of variations, but their limiting condition. It 
 secures that the organs, their functions, and, generally, 
 all that goes to determine the behaviour of the organism 
 should be on the balance suited to the maintenance of 
 the stock ; but it does not render it by any means 
 impossible that organs or modes of behaviour should 
 arise which are indifferent or even harmful to survival, 
 provided always that in the normal case the stock- 
 preserving organs and functions predominate ; and it 
 will easily be seen that the more highly developed the 
 organism, that is to say, the greater its power of mastering 
 the conditions of its life, the greater will be its scope for 
 indulgence in the impulses and feelings of this kind. 
 Hence it is that man of all evolving beings the one 
 which has greatest control over the conditions of his 
 life is capable on the one hand of interests extending 
 far beyond any questions of survival, on the other of 
 impulses violating on the largest scale the conditions of 
 a healthy life. We must not therefore exaggerate the 
 rough and general correspondence between impulse and
 
 42 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 pleasure on the one hand, and survival- value on the other ; 
 nor, to come to the second point, must we unduly limit 
 the conception of survival-value. That which governs 
 the formation of primitive strata of impulse and feeling 
 is their survival-value, not merely to the individual but 
 to the stock. If the impulse which serves the individual 
 survives, it is rather because through the individual it 
 perpetuates the stock than because it serves the needs 
 of the individual as such. Hence the evolutionary view 
 is opposed to an egoistic account of the primitive basis 
 of impulse and pleasure. The logical consequence to be 
 drawn from biological principles properly understood, 
 is that from the first both impulse and feeling are directed 
 to acts in which others are concerned primarily, the 
 mate and the young, but also in animals that live together, 
 the flock or the herd, or, in such cases as those of the 
 social insects, the animal community. Impulse and 
 feeling alike, then, may to this extent be from their origin 
 altruistic or social in character. 
 
 We are led, then, to conceive of feeling as a mode of 
 consciousness, the biological function of which is to 
 govern impulse. We may regard it as the response of 
 the hereditary structure, a structure which we are thus 
 forced to conceive as having a psychical side, i.e. as some- 
 thing manifesting itself in consciousness, as well as a 
 physical side, i.e. as something manifesting itself in 
 movements. What we feel will thus be determined in 
 the first place by the structure the psycho-physical 
 structure, as we may call it, to express its double nature 
 just as the impulse is determined by the structure, 
 and the feeling operates, if painful, by checking the 
 impulse, if pleasurable, by encouraging it. 
 
 3. But impulse, though governed and re-adjusted by the 
 feeling attendant on its results, does not yet of necessity 
 imply a conscious purpose. The chick's impulse to peck 
 at yolk may be encouraged by its past experience. But 
 this is not a sufficient ground for imputing to it what 
 we know as a remembrance of that experience, or the 
 anticipation of another experience of like character. In
 
 IMPULSE AND CONTROL 43 
 
 ourselves, however, we are aware of such memories and 
 anticipations, and it is here that what we can fairly call 
 purpose emerges. In the chick's case all that we know 
 is that experience leaves a certain effect, leaves a trace 
 which we know to exist because we see the result in a 
 change of behaviour, though we may know little of its 
 nature. 1 In our case, as stated, we do know something 
 of its nature. We know that on the ground of past 
 experience an idea is formed of a future experience, of 
 an experience that will be gained by a certain act, and 
 this idea regulates the act, reinforcing or checking the 
 impulse to perform it. When an impulse is qualified 
 by such an idea and directed towards an end so antici- 
 pated, it becomes purposive in the true sense of the term 
 and in its first incarnation we may call it a desire. Desire, 
 then, so understood, will be rooted in impulse on the one 
 side and in feeling on the other. 3 The two sources tend 
 
 1 We speak of it sometimes as a habit, sometimes as a disposition. 
 Of the precise physical change of tissue involved in the formation 
 of such states we know nothing by direct observation, and the psy- 
 chological state involved in a " disposition " is exceedingly difficult 
 to formulate except in terms of the action or state of consciousness 
 in which in response to the appropriate situation it issues. 
 
 It is natural to say that the end towards which Desire is 
 directed is the pleasure in the experience. But this does not 
 conform with psychological analysis. What we desire is the 
 experience itself, and our desire has a feeling-tone of its own corre- 
 spondent (not necessarily identical) with the feeling-tone of the 
 desired experience. In fact our power of representing to our- 
 selves a past or future feeling as distinctive from the experience 
 to which it belongs is small and perhaps nil. We can (a) judge 
 intellectually that such a feeling did or will occur, (b) experience 
 now a feeling about the past or future experience. Neither of 
 these is the same thing as the formation of a representative image 
 of a feeling as adequate as our representative image of, say, a figure. 
 Hence it is that our most poignant memories are attached to details 
 sometimes quite trivial details in the scene in which the 
 emotional crisis was cast. 
 
 Oh, moment one and infinite, 
 
 The water slips o'er stock and stone ; 
 
 The West is tender, hardly bright : 
 
 How grey at once is the evening grown 
 
 One star its chrysolite.
 
 44 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 to correspondence, partly because both alike are governed 
 by the conditions of existence, and partly because the 
 experience of feeling is always at work correcting the 
 operation of impulse. At the same time, since desire 
 is thus doubly rooted, we can never be sure that it will 
 coincide with the pleasurable experience which is only 
 one root of the two. They tend to coincidence, but do 
 not necessarily reach it. Often we still feel impelled 
 inexorably to an act from which we know that only 
 disappointment will result. The control of experience 
 is not strong enough to overcome original impulse, and 
 we are forced to desire what will only give us pain. Still, 
 as far as it goes, experience gives unity of direction to 
 impulse, and adjusts it better to the permanent conditions 
 of life as attested by the satisfaction felt in its accom- 
 plishment. 
 
 It will be observed that the definition of Desire as 
 Impulse directed towards an anticipated end conflicts 
 formally with the narrower usage, which expressly bars 
 anticipation from Impulse. It is here that the double 
 sense of the term impulse appears. For in Desire, and 
 in every action directed towards an end there is precisely 
 the same impulse-feeling that we find in impulsive action 
 proper. The difference is merely that in experiencing 
 the impulse the mind knows what it is about, is conscious 
 of its direction, and foresees or looks towards its final 
 issue. For the purposes of this discussion we shall use 
 the term impulse of this propelling element common to 
 all forms of action, and when we wish to speak of this 
 element as denuded of any anticipation of the end we 
 shall call it " bare " impulse. 1 
 
 The picture revives the emotion, not an image of the emotion. 
 The point is well brought out by Dr. Wohlgemuth, though it 
 is possible that his generalization is too sweeping (Pleasure- 
 Unpleasure, p. 218, etc.). For our immediate purpose the result 
 is that the driving force in desire is the tone of present feeling 
 attached to an idea. 
 
 1 The technical generic term for Impulse, Desire, and Will is 
 Conation. But there does not seem to be an accepted distinctive 
 term for the element which is common to them all.
 
 IMPULSE AND CONTROL 45 
 
 4. Desire in its stricter sense seems to be directed to 
 this or that particular object or event, whether it be one's 
 dinner, or success in a competition, or a political triumph, 
 or the possession of a piece of old china. These particulars, 
 however, are not isolated and casual, but are found for 
 the most part to range themselves about certain centres 
 of durable interest. Thus a parent desires a number 
 of different things for his child according as the circum- 
 stances and needs of his child vary from day to day, 
 or year to year. But all the desires alike emanate from 
 the same centre of emotional interest, and, moreover, 
 are controlled by it, so that, e.g., a desire to gratify the 
 child here and now is held back by consideration of some 
 more permanent effect. The system of emotions that 
 cluster round an object, such as another person, is now 
 called a sentiment, and the effect of sentiment on action 
 is that all the impulses and desires relating to the object 
 have a certain common tendency, e.g. the good of the 
 child. In this case the good of the child is an object 
 of volition, and volition is thus not so much a specific 
 impulse as a permeating tendency among a body of 
 impulses and desires, or, if we turn it round and judge 
 it by its aim, it is the direction of effort towards some 
 comprehensive end, to which a mass of impulses and 
 desires are subordinated as being that which makes their 
 real meaning and value explicit. Thus volition introduces 
 unity of direction into desire, just as desire introduced 
 unity into the lower impulses. 
 
 5. Now in a normal life there are, of course, many 
 objects which are such centres of durable interest, and 
 there would seem accordingly to be many volitions, and 
 a fair possibility of discord between them. But our 
 personality is one, and it is driven to find some means 
 of correlating them. In normal circumstances normal 
 people can always decide, whether between volitions, 
 desires, or impulses. This power of decision is what we 
 ordinarily call the Will, and it seems to postulate a certain 
 unity of our conative nature, and correlatively some 
 supreme unifying principle, rule, or end of action, setting
 
 46 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 out the real meaning of our life as a whole, just as any 
 partial volition sets out the real value of the desires and 
 impulses bearing upon its object. In reality, however, 
 this unity l is achieved with a measure of success, which 
 varies very materially with the idiosyncracies of the 
 individual and with the social tradition which supplies 
 the main outer guidance of his life. Where there is a 
 genuine religion, some supreme object or governing con- 
 ception of life so rich and many-sided that smaller things 
 find their appropriate place under its shadow, the solution 
 seems near. Where there is a definite and firmly-held 
 morality there is at least the means of deciding on particular 
 issues. Even a resolute egoism or the obstinate pursuit 
 of a limited object gives some unity to life, though a 
 gaunt and starved unity. If all such governing principles 
 fail we have a being like Plato's " Democratic Man," 
 who decides one thing one moment, and something contrary 
 the next moment, and though such a being has Will, 
 in that he does make decisions, he cannot be said to have 
 Will in the sense of any continuous and consistent 
 direction. It will be seen that the function of the Will 
 is to bring unity into our volitions, as the function of 
 volition was to unify desires. 2 The relation of will to 
 
 1 I.e. the unity of consistent action and coherent plan. The 
 basal unity of the self is the continuous identity of that which 
 experiences all the impulses, feelings, etc., whether these lead it 
 to harmonious or distracted and mutually incompatible lines of 
 action. 
 
 * This terminology is open to criticism on two grounds, (a) It 
 may be said that Volition is merely Latin for " willing," and that 
 I am therefore contrasting willing with will. I might reply that 
 this is pretty much what I mean to do. Our practical attitude 
 towards one of the permanent objects of our interest is, I think, 
 a department of our will, but it is not the whole will. Thus even 
 in e.g. our devotion to a child we must not be like ces peres de 
 families qui sont capables de tout. Thus the contrast is, so to put 
 it, between a will and the will, and since we cannot conveniently 
 use the term " a will " in this sense I substitute " a volition." 
 (6) It may be said that we desire success in many of these permanent 
 objects. The felt contrast between Desire and Will is that, in 
 Desire the end is attractive, and in will it may be either attractive 
 or constrained. This is because Will is concerned with a Whole
 
 IMPULSE AND CONTROL 47 
 
 general conceptions has seldom escaped attention. It 
 has been well understood that in the cool deliberation 
 which distinguishes voluntary action we bring impulse 
 and desire to the bar of general rules and permanent 
 interests. Before being led by impulse we weigh the 
 result and put a value on the anticipated fruition, and 
 we value it not merely by measuring the particular satis- 
 faction which it promises against the frustration of some 
 other impulse which it may involve, but rather by reference 
 to some standard of admitted value and of general applica- 
 tion. We consider its bearings on our permanent interests, 
 or on the interests of some other person, we ask whether 
 it conforms to law, morals, or religion, we weigh it by 
 standards and principles that we apply to others as well 
 as to ourselves. That is to say, the characteristic of 
 the deliberate voluntary action which distinguishes 
 human from animal action lies in the formation oi general 
 principles of action which tend to correlate our behaviour 
 from moment to moment with the purposes which belong 
 to our life as a whole and to the lives of others with whom 
 we are associated. We are able to do what, apparently, 
 the animal cannot do to conceive ourselves as a persistent 
 identity, abiding through the changing experiences of 
 life, and correspondingly conceive of others as identities 
 of the same kind, that is in a word as personalities. 
 We are able at the same time to appreciate as general 
 truths the rules of action which have grown up in such 
 a community of persons to determine the character of 
 their common life. It is accordingly in proportion to 
 the development of such relatively comprehensive ends 
 
 of which only some fraction is for the moment in question and 
 the interests of the whole overwhelm the attractiveness of the 
 fraction if there happens to be a collision. Desire and Will may 
 therefore coincide or be opposed. There is no objection to the 
 use of the term Desire in relation to the widest objects, but they 
 are not objects of Desire merely but of Will as well, because they 
 are still pursued in the specific forms or particular direction in 
 which they do not momentarily appear attractive. This holds 
 not only of governing principles of all life but of any enduring 
 objects. Such an object is therefore an object of volition.
 
 48 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 and principles of action that human conduct comes to 
 form a relatively regulated order, and social life an 
 organized whole. 
 
 7. On the other hand the relation of Will to general 
 principles has given rise to great difficulties by suggesting 
 a chasm between Will and impulse-feeling. Will itself 
 must have impulsive quality (in the general sense of the 
 term), or how could it govern us ? But what impulse 
 is or can be inspired by general and abstract principles 
 without reference to the concrete objects in which they 
 are realized ? The reply is that the real meaning of a 
 principle lies in the correlation of a mass of concrete 
 objects which it effects, and so similarly the -strength 
 or impelling force of the Will lies in the correlation of 
 the corresponding impulses. Just as the principle expresses 
 their meaning in general terms, so the Will expresses 
 their common, combined, or organized force. The 
 material, so to say, of Will is just the mass of impulse- 
 feeling, but this mass, instead of acting as a collection 
 of independent forces driving us hither and thither, is 
 organized in a clearer conception of results, and more 
 comprehensive views of life. Out of the original conational 
 tissue which gave rise to feeling and impulse and desire, 
 there develops, if the metaphor be allowed, a new and 
 more precise organ of conduct. Of the original mass of 
 impulses those elements which conflict are in part worn 
 away, in part re-moulded so as to fit in with one another. 
 Others are strengthened and confirmed by practice and 
 by mutual alliance. All have assumed more concrete 
 shape as they come into relation with experience. The 
 total result, so far as the organization of conduct extends, 
 is a synthesis of conational elements moving as a body 
 under the guidance of some definite conception. To 
 picture very imperfectly the nature of this development, 
 let us first imagine the whole conative force of the soul 
 dispersed in impulses and desires capable of acting each 
 only in its own direction, under its appropriate stimulus 
 of sense-perception or of anticipated fruition. Let us 
 then imagine in contrast a gathering of all this energy
 
 IMPULSE AND CONTROL 49 
 
 of feeling, of emotion, of conation, into an organized 
 whole, moving in a determinate direction, and capable 
 of bringing its whole force to bear at any point. This 
 is the essential contrast between sheer impulse and fully 
 developed will. We can conceive that such an organized 
 psychic movement will present itself rather as the calm 
 and ordered flow of a deep tide of vital energy than as 
 the fireworks of emotion or the half-sensual flow of 
 impulses. Though all these are at bottom one, as manifes- 
 tations of feeling or conative energy, they differ in form 
 and many important consequences flow from their differ- 
 ence. Those err who attribute to bare impulse, emotion 
 or will severally, that which is due to the energy within 
 us which takes all these forms. Will is not emotion, 
 though it is of the force which, dammed back from its 
 outlet in ordered activity, forms the emotional flood. 
 It is not bare impulse, but embodies the active energy 
 of impulse within it. It is a gathering of much, ideally 
 of the whole, conational energy of our nature canalized 
 into a deep and steady stream flowing within determinate 
 limits in ordered activity to foreseen ends 
 
 It is then in the construction of broad ends, in which 
 the otherwise scattered elements of our nature have their 
 several functions, that the conational synthesis which 
 we express by the term " will " takes its rise, and that 
 our nature as a whole tends to acquire the permanent 
 bent and definiteness of direction which distinguish the 
 life of will from that of impulse and emotion. But the 
 wholeness and unity of our nature remain ideals which 
 are realized in very varying degree. We will, because, 
 in the main, the forces of our nature set in a given direc- 
 tion, but we do not will whole-heartedly because the 
 synthesis is incomplete. The primary impulses remain, 
 and the vision of the wider ends is not clear enough, or 
 not realized with adequate intensity of feeling. And it 
 is because, in the conflict between desire and will, we 
 are urged by massed forces of impulse guided by con- 
 ceptions which, perhaps, we can only in part make articu- 
 late, that we have that sense of constraint which is so
 
 50 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 conspicuous in the case of felt moral obligation, where 
 there is a definite tension between the rebellious desire 
 and the orderly community which we express as " will." 
 In this tension there is the force of a clearly realized 
 appealing end on the one hand, and the more massive, 
 perhaps less intensely and definitely conscious, main 
 current of our nature upon the other. It diminishes 
 accordingly as the will acquires full control, though it 
 can never vanish for the best of men as long as the tragic 
 complexities of life set duty in opposition to ties of 
 affection. A morality which should be as spontaneous 
 as instinct implies not only a perfect will, but a perfect 
 order of life. 1 
 
 Will, then, is the synthesis of impulsive or conative 
 elements in man that responds to comprehensive ends 
 and unifying principles, just as desire is the impulsive 
 element that responds to narrower and more immediate 
 ends. Though bare impulse is left far behind, the impul- 
 sive energies, pruned, refined, consolidated, remain the 
 driving force to the end. Just as action always rests 
 on impulse in this broad sense, so impulse turns on feeling 
 in a similarly broad sense. The term feeling so used is to 
 include the emotion that governs the simplest impulse. 
 It is to include the interest, the excitement, the emotional 
 tone which the idea of the end carries in the period of 
 
 1 Our argument tends to the close correlating of the will with 
 the self or the personality and to conceive its ends as those of the 
 self as a whole. This does not imply that the will is peculiarly 
 moved by the idea of the self, or by sentiments and emotions of 
 self-exaltation or self-abasement. Such reflective inward-turned 
 emotions do of course play their part. But to identify the will 
 with the unity of the self in its conational aspect is not to make 
 the self the object of the will. The object of the will, the principles 
 that guide it, are those which interest the self and these are not 
 (for the normal being) the self again. The self is not its own 
 exclusive object, but many things God, humanity, country, 
 morality, another person or persons objects such as these govern- 
 ing large tracts of life are true objects of, or principles guiding, 
 Will. Though some of them may not affect life as a whole they 
 impart a far larger measure of unity than would be achieved by 
 mere impulse or emotion.
 
 IMPULSE AND CONTROL 51 
 
 anticipation or effort. It is to include the gratification 
 or disappointment which attend upon realization. It is 
 to range from the simple impulses of sense to the most 
 refined and complex interests of ethics, art, or religion. 
 Throughout we may regard an end as the terminal 
 point of a line of action upon which, as the resultant of 
 a thousand tensions and pressures of physical heredity, 
 of present experience, of social interactions, feeling 
 moves. So we may conceive it as feeling crystallized 
 into something definite and conceptual. In all cases a 
 genuine end is something about which we feel, and there 
 is no principle of action derivable from thought or 
 ratiocination abstracted from feeling. 
 
 On the other hand, feeling is modifiable, and the 
 purposes in which it expresses itself still more modifiable. 
 Experience largely remodels impulse, or suggests new 
 means to the same ends. Divergent ends impinge on 
 one another, social relations not only define the possi- 
 bilities of effective action for the individual, but inter- 
 penetrate and profoundly modify the whole sphere of 
 his feeling itself. Religious and scientific beliefs give the 
 tone to the mass of men's hopes and fears. Hence a 
 double possibility of thorough modification. In a changed 
 intellectual or social situation the same fundamental 
 feelings may give rise to a very different body of 
 purpose, while such changes, and even its own internal 
 growth and interactions, may have far-reaching reactions 
 upon feeling itself. In the sense understood, then, 
 action rests on impulse-feeling, and it is useless to look 
 for anything, call it Practical Reason, Will, or what we 
 may, that stands outside the body of impulse-feeling 
 and controls it. But impulse-feeling is completely trans- 
 formed by a development, which taken as a whole tends 
 to combine its centrifugal elements into an organized 
 body, directed to comprehensive ends which are formu- 
 lated in large and articulate conceptions of the significance 
 of conduct. It is within this development, if anywhere, 
 that we must look for the practical Reason. Our first 
 step in the search must clearly be to form as precise a
 
 52 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 conception as possible of what is meant by the Rational, 
 and the next to apply our definition in the sphere of 
 conduct. 
 
 NOTE 
 
 Since this chapter was written Dr. Wohlgemuth's able mono- 
 graph Pleasure-Unpleasure, has appeared, advocating views of 
 Feeling which, in some points, conflict with those taken above. 
 While I am not here concerned with psychological analysis and 
 do not think that the divergencies in question would sensibly affect 
 ethical theory, I feel obliged to explain why I leave my statement 
 standing, with a modification which I will proceed to state. The 
 main points are two : (i) As to nomenclature, Dr. Wohlgemuth 
 treats it as settled that pain is not the true contrast to pleasure, 
 but is a positive sensation which may be pleasant or unpleasant 
 feeling-tone. As to this, I am inclined to reply : It is agreed 
 that we must distinguish between the feeling-tone of an experience 
 and the whole experience to which the feeling-tone belongs. The 
 traditional psychological nomenclature, as I understand, used the 
 terms Pleasure and Pain for this purpose, viz. as names of two great 
 (if not exhaustive) classes of feeling-tone. But popular language 
 also uses Pain for the whole experience in certain cases, e.g. aches 
 and burns, and not in others, e.g. foul smells. Hence there is a 
 possible confusion which it is certainly desirable to avoid. But 
 does not very nearly the same confusion arise about pleasure ? 
 Here it is that I would modify a sentence (p. 38, footnote). It 
 is true, pleasures do not form so definite a class as pains in popular 
 speech. Yet a good deal of ethical controversy has turned on 
 the relation of pleasure and happiness, and on the whole " pleasure," 
 in ordinary speech, suggests, if not a defined class, at any rate 
 a range of experiences centering on the more elementary rather 
 than the higher side of our nature. Yet to me it seems that the 
 deepest tranquil happiness (as of assured love or firm religious 
 faith) has a strong feeling-tone and that this feeling-tone, with 
 all its vast difference of significance, has a point in common with 
 that of a sensory satisfaction. Be that as it may, there is a clear 
 distinction between pleasure as a feeling-tone and pleasure as the 
 whole experience to which the feeling-tone belongs, and when 
 pleasure is so used the same considerations arise as in the case of 
 pain. For " pleasures " cloy, i.e. assume unpleasant feeling- one 
 just as pains sometimes stimulate, excite, titillate, i.e. assume 
 more or less pleasurable feeling-tone. Hence, if the argument is 
 pressed we must abandon pleasure along with pain and find some 
 quite conventional terms, or perhaps symbols such as P and fl 
 for the opposed feeling-tones in distinction from the experiences
 
 IMPULSE AND CONTROL 53 
 
 which normally carry such tones. To banish pain and retain 
 pleasure seems illogical. 
 
 The question of terms, however, runs, as such questions gener- 
 ally do, into one of substance. Dr. Wohlgemuth maintains (esp. 
 pp. 211, 235) that " there are only two qualities of feeling-elements, 
 viz. Pleasure and Unpleasure. Any differences except intensity, 
 duration, and extensity are apparent only and are found to belong 
 to sensations or other cognitive or (to) conative processes." (I 
 imagine that under " extensity " Dr. Wohlgemuth intends to 
 include localization.) It follows that the only feeling-element 
 common to a burning pain and a sickening fear is their unpleasure. 
 All the rest is sensory (or otherwise cognitive) or conational. I 
 find it, from my own introspection or retrospection, exceedingly 
 difficult to accept this. The two states appear to me to agree 
 in something much fuller and richer than the very attenuated 
 abstraction of unpleasantness. This something I should call 
 feeling, and while in each case the feeling has the generic character 
 of unpleasure, I should say that it also exhibited profound specific 
 differences. If you ask me to name these differences, I admit 
 that I find it extremely difficult to do so (apart from localization) 
 except by reference either to the stimulus (including the general 
 situation) or some elements of conation. But I accept the view 
 that the feeling is neither the cognition of the stimulating object 
 nor the conation. I suppose it to be that which stands between 
 and connects them, and I take the difficulty of describing it apart 
 from them as evidence of the intimacy of the union. To a point 
 Dr. Wohlgemuth would agree in this. His rule on the subject is : 
 
 " The feeling-elements are not attributes or functions of sen- 
 sations or other cognitive processes, but a separate class of conscious 
 processes. Although generally closely dependent upon the cognitive 
 and conative processes to which they belong, they often show a 
 certain degree of independence and detachment." 
 
 Now I do not think that any one would deny that analysis is 
 capable of distinguishing the element of feeling-tone from the 
 other elements in consciousness along with it. The question is, 
 first, whether the feeling can exist independently of other elements, 
 second, whether what can so exist is pure pleasure or unpleasure 
 denuded of other qualitative content. As to the first point Dr. 
 Wohlgemuth adduces evidence (e.g. that the pleasure may precede 
 the sensation). Here he has only one case (p. 184, referring to 
 exp. Y. 24, see p. 108). What " Y " exactly says is : " First, 
 feeling-tone of pressure sensation (seemed to be pressure down- 
 wards) which was not unpleasant. As pressure increased it became 
 more unpleasant. As the feeling-tone became markedly un- 
 pleasant sensation of pain arose. The unpleasant feeling- tone 
 preceded the pain sensation. I can analyse the unpleasant feeling- 
 tone from the pressure sensation, but not from the pain-sensation.'*
 
 54 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 This passage (which by the way tells strongly against the quali- 
 tative distinction between Pain and Unpleasure) does not show 
 that unpleasant feeling-tone arises without any sensation, but 
 only without that definite sensation called by the writer Pain. 
 It arose in the first instance with the pressure and, in its higher 
 degree (as my terminology would put it) became so distinctly 
 painful as to be recognized as such. 
 
 As to pleasure outlasting sensation, every one knows that the 
 effects of stimuli persist for a little while. The question is in what 
 form does the feeling persist ? Dr. Wohlgemuth has three in- 
 stances. The first of these (W. 32, p. 26) concludes : " There 
 were also organic sensations which seemed to be an integral part 
 of, or helped to constitute, a mood of repose which was distinctly 
 pleasant. Pleasure lasted for some time after removal of stimulus." 
 
 This speaks for itself. The second case from the same subject 
 is an olfactory experiment in which, without further detail bearing 
 on the point, the subject states, " Pleasure persisted for some time 
 after removal." In fact, scents hang in the nostrils. In the third 
 case, also olfactory, the subject says, " After the stimulus had 
 been removed I had an idea of the act of smelling, and the idea 
 had none of the olfactory quality of the original experience, but 
 it retained the feeling-tone that had accompanied the sensation." 
 That is, the feeling-tone is explicitly attached to the idea. 
 
 It results that the cases cited do not prove the thesis that feelings 
 arise or persist independently of either cognitive or conative 
 elements. 
 
 Secondly, as to what the feelings are. Several statements agree 
 that they are distinguishable elements in consciousness, but dis- 
 tinguishable with difficulty. Here is a typical statement (X. 101, 
 quoted p. 211). 
 
 " As to the quality of the feeling-tones of the sensations, I cannot 
 compare definitely enough to perceive any qualitative difference 
 in them. The difficulty is to distinguish the feeling- tones from 
 the quality of the sensations on the one hand, and the quality of 
 the motor reactions excited on the other hand. Allowing for 
 these differences there seemed to be nothing left except differences 
 of duration and intensity." 
 
 This will obviously be the result if we put all the qualitative 
 differences into the cognitive or conative elements one or both. 
 But if we do so all that is left for feeling is something so abstract 
 that the subjects have difficulty in distinguishing it. They will 
 agree that it is pleasurable or unpleasurable, because these are 
 admittedly general (if not universal) qualities of feeling. But we 
 are asked to think of this element distinguished so vaguely and 
 with such difficulty as all that we mean by feeling and as capable 
 of an independent existence. It is the combination of these pro- 
 positions which appears to me so difficult. If you will allow me
 
 IMPULSE AND CONTROL 55 
 
 to include within the scope of feeling elements that you insist on 
 calling cognitive or conative I have no great difficulty in regarding 
 feeling as independent, i.e. as requiring no further co-present 
 element in consciousness to complete it. But if you insist on 
 excluding all these you fall back on what seems to me an abstrac- 
 tion. The most I can admit (as in the text) is that in extreme 
 cases the cognitive elements, that is all that is distinguishable, 
 get merged into one ecstasy of delight or suffering, but I point 
 out that this is the last stage before the entire loss of consciousness, 
 and very significantly, it has been recognized as a stage in which 
 extremes very nearly meet and pleasure and pain themselves are 
 on the verge of becoming undistinguishable. Perhaps I should 
 also add that, at the opposite extreme where feeling is minimal, 
 analysis will find its pleasant or unpleasant character the easiest 
 point to lay hold of. These extreme cases to my mind rather 
 strengthen the position that definite pleasures are attributes of 
 feelings of definite quality other than pure pleasureableness. The 
 further proof, as I think, is that the intensity of feeling does not 
 vary uniformly with its pleasantness or unpleasantness. For 
 example, anger may be very intense but is not proportionately 
 painful unless thwarted. All states of emotional tension are capable 
 at a touch of turning to extremes of pleasant or unpleasant feeling, 
 but while they are themselves very strongly felt the characters 
 of pleasure or unpleasure are not always clearly marked in them. 
 The conclusions which, as at present advised, I should draw 
 are that definite feeling is attached to cognitive or conative elements 
 or both ; that, however, its variations of intensity do not neces- 
 sarily depend on their variations (in clearness, etc.) and it may 
 persist with little or no change through considerable variations 
 of the other element ; that in consequence (though I have criticized 
 his evidence) Dr. Wohlgemuth is right in his conclusion that feeling 
 possesses a partial independence ; that in fact feeling may so 
 encroach on the other elements as in the extreme case to occupy 
 the whole of consciousness ; that at this limit, it would seem, even 
 the knowledge of the feeling certainly any power of naming or 
 classifying it must disappear. On the other hand, the feeling 
 which possesses this measure of independence includes elements 
 which Dr. Wohlgemuth calls sensory or conative ; it exhibits 
 numberless specific variations, and pleasure and unpleasure are 
 merely two of its attributes. Pleasure and unpleasure never exist 
 by themselves but only as characters of some feeling possessed 
 of other characters, though in very low and perhaps in extremely 
 high grades of feeling they are the most easily recognizable 
 characters.
 
 I. WE have to ask, then, first what is meant by the 
 Rational, by a rational procedure and a rational order ? 
 If the question is difficult, it is perhaps easier to see what 
 is meant by the Irrational. In the first place, then, 
 inconsistency is admittedly irrational. It is irrational 
 in the field of thought to admit two judgments which 
 contradict each other, in the field of action to pursue 
 two purposes which destroy one another, or to accept 
 and approve a principle of action condemning a purpose 
 which at the same time we pursue. Conversely the 
 rational, whatever else it may be, must at least be self- 
 consistent. Next, though perhaps less obviously, the 
 arbitrary judgment is irrational. This will be more 
 readily admitted if for " arbitrary " we substitute 
 " groundless." It is irrational to form a judgment 
 without a ground, and whatever else we may say about 
 " grounds " it is clear from the very fact that a ground 
 is required, and may not always be found that the ground 
 contains something which is not within the judgment 
 that follows from it. If, then, we would avoid a ground- 
 less judgment we must be able to connect our judgment 
 with something that goes beyond it, and this work of 
 interconnexion is the main positive function of reason. 
 Thirdly, it is held irrational to base a judgment on emotion 
 or desire, or, indeed, on any " subjective " attitude, any 
 impulse that proceeds merely from ourselves. But this 
 condemnation must be subject to two qualifications. 
 In the first place the judgment may be about the emotions, 
 or may be simply an expression of the emotions, e.g. " This 
 
 56
 
 THE RATIONAL 57 
 
 is revolting," " that is enchanting." For judgments of 
 this class the emotion itself is the only appropriate ground. 
 Secondly, every judgment of mine as it issues from me 
 must in a manner be held to emanate from my subjec- 
 tivity, to be an expression of my thought working in 
 accordance with the methods and processes of my mental 
 constitution. It seems, then, that we cannot mean to 
 condemn the subjective altogether. What we must 
 mean is to condemn it in so far as it diverts us from the 
 objective, and this means something that is, whether 
 you or I happen to think so, or say so, or not. The 
 rational, then, is that which deals with the objective 
 order. But the objective is not unfortunately so plainly 
 hall-marked that we distinguish it immediately and 
 infallibly from the subjective, and if we ask how we effect 
 the distinction the answer is, by the two former require- 
 ments of rationality. We correct error by the exposure 
 of inconsistency. We arrive at such exposure by the 
 interconnexion of one judgment with another. We 
 support judgments by reference to their grounds, and 
 then believe that we have obtained objectivity or, more 
 briefly, truth. Truth, then, is generally the object of 
 reason or the purpose of the rational procedure, and 
 interconnexion subject to mutual consistency its method. 
 2. But now with regard to interconnexion some serious 
 difficulties arise. First, we have said that we believe 
 the grounded judgment to be true. But this implies 
 that the ground is adequate, and we may well ask what 
 is the test of adequacy. The ground itself, in fact, seems 
 to require a ground, and this threatens to lead to an infinite 
 regress. There must, it should seem, be some primary 
 grounds requiring no further justification, but if so the 
 judgments affirming them would be isolated judgments, 
 and so far, apparently, irrational. And must we not, 
 apart from them, admit other isolated judgments ? I 
 heard a clap. I can bring no evidence in support of my 
 assertion, it may be, and yet the fact is that 1 heard it. 
 That is of itself evidence. It is an ultimate fact, and 
 there is no more to be said. Even if others heard it too,
 
 58 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 and I bring their evidence in corroboration, is not the 
 ultimate basis a distinct and ungrounded judgment, just 
 " I heard it " from each witness ? There seem, then, to 
 be isolated judgments, e^x , at each end of the scale 
 the most general grounds, and the final particular fact. 
 With regard to the particular, however, a little reflec- 
 tion will show that the judgment which we accept as 
 true is not so isolated as it appears, and that in fact we 
 finally accept it only as grounded, and well grounded, 
 on a general principle. If the question is, did a clap 
 occur, my evidence that I heard it is good in so far, 
 and only in so far, as I am a credible witness, and as my 
 subjective hearing is good proof of an objective sound. 
 In so far as I accept in general the testimony of my senses 
 I assert what they report, so that my particular assertion 
 has a ground in the sense that it is connected with the 
 general body of my sensory judgments, and is, in fact, 
 to be taken as valid in proportion as this body of judgments 
 is to be regarded as generally accurate, and as it the 
 judgment in question is a normal part of them, and is 
 not disturbed by anything exceptional. All evidence as 
 to " particulars " is in fact subject to tests and open to 
 corroboration on such lines as these. Thus the sensory 
 judgment, direct and ultimate as it is, is in its wa}^ a 
 grounded judgment. Yet this statement in turn gives 
 rise to a difficulty. For the ground is in this case another 
 judgment or body of judgments of the same kind. In 
 proof of the existence of a sensible object we may appeal 
 from sound to sight, and from sight to touch, and from 
 one man's sight or touch to another's, but we are always 
 appealing from one sensory judgment to another, and if 
 we appeal to the general credibility of sensory judgments 
 on what would this rest, except on the credibility of 
 numbers of particular sensory judgments ? If, therefore, 
 the intrinsic value of a sensory judgment is nil, and our 
 confidence in it based only on its grounds, these grounds 
 turn out to be equally of zero value, and, the sum of 
 zeros being zero, we get no nearer to any ground of real 
 confidence. It results that we must not deny all value
 
 THE RATIONAL 59 
 
 to a direct sensory judgment ; if we are going to trust 
 the system formed by such judgments we must allow 
 each such judgment provisional value, such that when 
 confirmed by interconnexion with other judgments of 
 similar provisional value it becomes for us a confirmed 
 or established judgment. This principle may be put 
 generally. A judgment which we form under some 
 stimulus, but not merely on the ground of some other 
 judgment, may be called an immediate judgment. Such 
 judgment has in reason a provisional value, and when 
 interconnected with other immediate judgments so that 
 if they are true it is true it becomes a rationally established 
 judgment. 
 
 3. At what point would the process be complete so 
 that we could take the established judgment as estab- 
 lished once for all, beyond possibility of further question 
 or need of further proof ? Clearly it would be complete 
 if we could connect it with some judgments of undoubted 
 truth, which must, of course, in the end be immediate 
 judgments. Now immediate sensory judgments, we have 
 seen, require grounding, for no matter how clearly and 
 forcibly their objects seem to impress themselves upon 
 us we find by comparison that our reports of such objects 
 are not always self -consistent, and though we may admit 
 that there is a core of truth in every immediate sensory 
 judgment, the questions that arise are those of distin- 
 guishing the hard core from the interpretations that 
 gather about it, and this it is clear the immediate judgment 
 does not always effect, since we know cases in which it 
 is erroneous. Are there, then, immediate judgments at 
 the other end of the scale, ultimate generalities of un- 
 doubted truth on which all other judgments may be 
 grounded, and so established once and for all ? Now 
 there certainly appear to be judgments of a general 
 character which are as immediate as the judgments of 
 sense. That is to say, that, contemplating certain ideal 
 objects, we become directly aware in them of relations 
 or characters attaching to them. Propound to the 
 mind the idea of a plane rectilineal figure of three sides
 
 60 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 and explain the nature of an angle, and the mind will 
 readily grasp that the three-sided figure must have three 
 angles. This is correctly called intuition. In it a character 
 of an object is discerned by a process of mental inspection, 
 and the truth asserted may be called self-evident. But 
 rational criticism will no more let these intuitive judgments 
 alone than it would let sensory judgments alone. On 
 the contrary, it will maintain that the self-evident judg- 
 ment, so long as it is unconnected with others, has only 
 provisional value, and it will accordingly go on to ask, 
 as it did of the sensory judgment, what general credibility 
 is to be attached to intuition. Is every immediate judg- 
 ment that is formed by every mind to be taken as true, 
 and so certainly true as to require no proof ? The answer 
 to this question must be in the negative. It is easy to 
 produce the illusion of immediate obviousness, e.g. a 
 non-mathematical person questioned as to the shortest 
 way from A to B, which is due east of it, will reply as 
 a matter of course that the route must be due east all 
 the way, and will resist as sheer nonsense the statement 
 that a route moving to the north (or south) is in general 
 shorter. But with the aid of a globe, or even a common 
 ball, it is easy to convince even the least mathematical 
 of his error in a couple of minutes. Of course the fallacy 
 rests on a confusion of different things a straight line 
 and a line drawn on the surface of a sphere. But at 
 what point do we become certain that there are no similar 
 elements of confusion in any truth which we affirm as 
 a matter of intuitive apprehension ? Many people would 
 say that to them the existence of a God is a truth of 
 this kind. Others would deny that they have any such 
 intuition. Mathematical axioms that have passed current 
 for centuries have been called in question, and it has been 
 shown possible to construct consistent systems of thought 
 on a basis which involves their negation. Self-evidence 
 is in fact the impression which a propounded object 
 makes upon a mind which thereupon delivers itself of 
 a judgment as to that object, interpreting it after some 
 fashion. This deliverance is a function not of one variable,
 
 THE RATIONAL 61 
 
 the object, but of two, the object and the mind, with 
 all its peculiarities of structure and make-up, its instincts, 
 innate methods, and history by which these methods 
 have been modified. This make-up may be such that 
 the deliverance is a judgment asserting the object to be 
 what it is, have the characters which it has, stand in the 
 relations in which it does stand, or it may be such as to 
 diverge in some degree or at some point from such corre- 
 spondence. The test can only lie in consistency with other 
 judgments. Here, as elsewhere, interconnexion is required. 
 
 4. If this view is correct it results that the basis of 
 certainty and truth is in the end interconnexion. Any 
 isolated judgment, though it may of course be quite true 
 and may be felt to be quite certain, is regarded as pro- 
 visional and subject to criticism and corroboration by 
 other judgments. At the same time each immediate 
 judgment which impresses itself on us as true contributes 
 its measure of support to the system in which it enters, 
 and the strength of the system is in the mutual support 
 or consilience of its component judgments, so that in 
 this case the ground (by way of exception to our first 
 statement about grounds) is really internal. True, the 
 entire system may also be connected with other systems, 
 but if we could arrive at a system containing all thought 
 and all experience, it could have no ground and no proof 
 in anything outside itself, but only in its internal character 
 as a complete system of interconnected parts. Thus the 
 principle that ground or proof lies outside the judgment 
 grounded and proved applies to the relation of part to 
 part or to whole, but the ground or proof of a whole lies 
 equally and in the case of the final ideal whole entirely 
 in the very connectedness of parts, each claiming 
 immediate acceptance, which constitute it. In this 
 sense the ideal of knowledge is self -evidence, not the self- 
 evidence of an isolated truth on which the rest depend, 
 but that of the consilience of a system of partial truths 
 completing each other. 
 
 5. Judgments asserting facts are connected by the 
 relations of the facts which they assert. Hence the
 
 62 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 demand of reason for the ground of any judgment is at 
 the next remove a demand for the ground of the fact. 
 The ground of a fact is such that if the ground exists 
 we believe that the fact, known as its consequent, exists. 
 This in other words amounts to the proposition that in 
 any case where the ground exists the consequent exists. 
 That is to say, the relation of ground and consequent is 
 universal. The search for grounds is thus a search for 
 universal relations underlying or connecting the mass 
 of facts with which thought is confronted. The activity 
 of reason consists in the discovery of universal grounds 
 and their application when ascertained in fresh cases. 
 So far as we reason about a thing we treat it as having 
 a ground which connects it with other things, and as this 
 connection can be constantly extended by repetition of 
 the process we arrive at the ideal of reason as an order 
 of reality built up of a system of universals interconnecting 
 all its parts. 
 
 6. We rejected above the view that knowledge could 
 be made to depend on certain universal first principles 
 requiring no ground or interconnexion with other truths, 
 because self-evident. But what, it may be asked, of 
 the principles of interconnexion themselves ? We inter- 
 connect one judgment with another by certain methods 
 which, when we come to analyse them, will be found to 
 involve some principle. How do we know the truth of 
 this principle ? It would appear that we cannot prove 
 it because proof would involve interconnection with 
 something else, and the interconnection would itself 
 imply the principle to be proven. The reply is that the 
 validity of the principle rests on its being a correct analysis 
 of the processes which we go through in reasoning so 
 far as they are consistent with one another. In point 
 of fact we do not always reason correctly, and the nature 
 of our mistakes and their grounds are brought out when 
 we analyse the method and formulate its principle. But 
 if the principle is correctly stated it lays down a consistent 
 method of inference, and every inference that we draw 
 upon this method implies the principle. Thus, through
 
 THE RATIONAL 63 
 
 the medium of the principle all our acts of inference 
 necessitate or support one another, and each and all 
 require the truth of the principle, so that rational method 
 itself forms a whole of interconnected parts. 
 
 7. The conception of reason which thus emerges is 
 not one of a faculty possessed, prior to and apart from 
 experience, of certain clear and indubitable universal 
 axioms with which it confronts a tangled experience 
 proving and explaining so much as can be brought under 
 these axioms and leaving the rest unrationalized. It 
 is the conception rather of a principle operative within 
 experience the work of which is always partial and incom- 
 plete, always extending itself while at the same time 
 pruning and sharpening its own methods. Neither proof 
 nor explanation consist in the reference of the experienced 
 order to something outside it, but in the exhibition of 
 its internal coherence, i.e. the system of universal 
 connexions in accordance with which its parts do not 
 merely tolerate one another in mutual consistency, but 
 require and maintain one another. The provisional and 
 partial truths are established not merely by deduction 
 from some special truth taken as known, 1 but, ultimately, 
 by the simple fact that they form a whole of consilient 
 truths. The isolated and partial fact again is not so 
 much explained by subsumption under some self-evident 
 law as by its part in the comprehensive system of universals 
 which is reality. Finally, as every part -judgment has 
 its proof in the body with which it is connected, so the 
 proof of the body of judgments as a whole is in their 
 standing together as a connected system, and if any part 
 of reality become intelligible by relation to the remainder 
 a whole field of reality becomes intelligible as constituting 
 such a system. Of any part, however great and however 
 articulate internally, we can, and indeed must always 
 go on to ask about its connections with further reality. 
 But if we envisage reality as a whole we can ask no such 
 
 1 This of course may be the proximate step, but the truth used 
 as a principle will find its ultimate justification in the manner 
 denoted.
 
 64 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 question, and here intelligibility must mean simply the 
 internal completeness of interconnexions running through 
 all its elements. 
 
 Reason then generically is the principle of interconnexion 
 persistently applied. Since the whole of Reality does not 
 fall within our experience, the work of interconnexion 
 is never complete. Hence reason does not necessarily 
 claim finality for its interpretations. What is rationally 
 established is that which is incorporated in a system of 
 consilient judgments. If the reflective judgment, " This 
 is certain," can without contradiction be inserted into 
 any such system, then the system is rationally held 
 certain. But in general there is at least a possibility 
 that further experience may throw fresh light upon 
 established interpretations, and yet this does not prevent 
 them from being the most reasonable interpretation 
 f within our reach. Hence the rational as such is not 
 ! an established system, but a process governed by a 
 principle, the process by which understardirg deepens, 
 \ error is repeatedly eliminated, and truth constantly 
 enlarged. As operating in the sphere of assertion 
 (including knowledge, suggestion, and belief), reason is 
 the use of this principle as the discovery of the objective 
 order, the result of this discovery being truth. As 
 applied in spheres other than that of assertion we 
 have yet to examine what it means. The principle of 
 interconnexion carried through yields a whole in which 
 the parts sustain and necessitate one another, or briefly 
 an organized whole. Thus reason is an organic principle 
 in thought, and so far as incomplete but progressive 
 may be termed an organic impulse. So far as reality is 
 finally intelligible to reason it must similarly be interpre- 
 table as an organic whole, so that we may speak of reason 
 as the ultimate organic principle alike in thought and in 
 reality. Finally, the fact that reason, even as incomplete 
 impulse, is the endeavour towards the whole which inter- 
 connects the parts is the basis of its sovereignty over 
 every partial impulse or isolated belief, whatever degree 
 of immediate subjective certitude such belief may claim.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE GOOD 
 
 i. WE have now to apply the definition of the rational 
 to the world of practice. The first step in this application 
 is simple. It is easy to see that when we give a reason 
 for some act we first connect it with its end or aim, and 
 that, if we want a reason for this end in turn, we must 
 connect it either with some further end, or with some 
 broad principle of action. It is an easy inference that 
 if there is a rational order of action our purposes must 
 form an interconnected system. But from this point 
 difficulties begin. Any system of action that we can 
 propound, however consistent internally, will be discovered 
 to collide with impulses, desires, interests of ourselves 
 or of other people, and the question of the basis and 
 authority of our system will at once arise. An end or 
 principle of action once assumed, the part of reason is 
 intelligible enough. It deduces consequences, connects 
 means and ends, shows that such an action follows from 
 the principle while such another is inconsistent with it. 
 So far it seems to be just the reason of cognition applied 
 to matters of fact, with the difference only that the facts 
 in question are human actions and their consequences. 
 But what is to happen if two ends, two principles, or, 
 in general terms, two (or more) things that we consider 
 good occur to us, and they happen to be incompatible 
 with one another ? We are forced to choose between 
 them. Can reason have anything to do with the choice 
 of ends or the preference of one sort of good over another ? 
 Has it anything to do with ultimate choice, or is it confined 
 
 5 *
 
 66 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 to the cognitive apprehension of consistency or incon- 
 sistency between the several things that we may choose ? 
 Are there ends, or is there some end which must commend 
 itself to a rational being as good, and as so good that 
 everything incompatible with it is bad ? Or is the 
 preference of one thing over another a matter, in the 
 last resort, of a choice with which reason has nothing 
 to do ? Is there, in short, a Rational Good, and if so, 
 how is it to be denned ? 
 
 2. We must first be clear as to what we mean by 
 " good." Our words and our thoughts do not always 
 coincide, but sincerely to think that a thing is good is 
 to adopt towards it a certain attitude of mind which 
 affects our actions and affects also our judgments of 
 the actions of others. In so far as we think a thing good 
 for ourselves here and now as opposed to merely doing 
 lip-service to its goodness we are disposed to act in 
 such a way as to secure or preserve it. Our disposition 
 may be overborne by some strong contrary impulse. 
 But if an end is genuinely conceived as good, it means 
 that we have at least some feeling for it. This feeling 
 has several consequences. It tends, though not always 
 with success, to direct our own action towards the end 
 in question ; to make us approve and support those 
 who act in a similar way ; to render us sympathetically 
 interested in anything that promotes it and adversely 
 affected by anything of a contrary tendency. These 
 and similar feelings and dispositions relative to any given 
 end make up the practical attitude which the term " good " 
 expresses. Observe, however, that while the judgment 
 " this is good " expresses a disposition, it also asserts 
 a fact. It asserts something to be the object of a favour- 
 able disposition, and if the judgment is true this relation 
 is real. The practical attitude or disposition is not, 
 indeed, the assertion, but it is a part of that which is 
 asserted. There is thus a double action of the mind 
 involved in the judgment of value, a practical attitude 
 and an assertion of fact, and the practical attitude may 
 be said to express itself in the assertion.
 
 THE GOOD 67 
 
 But it will be objected, I may recognize as good in 
 some sense much that does not appeal to me. In particular 
 I may recognize that something would be very good indeed 
 for another person, but if I am absorbed in my own 
 interests the knowledge leaves me cold. My attitude 
 to this " good " is an " intellectual," not a practical 
 attitude. Be it so. It still remains that, in recognizing 
 that A B holds this or that to be good for him, I recognize 
 that there is something about which he, and those 
 who are interested in him, are feeling, to which he and 
 they adopt a practical attitude. Similarly, in admitting 
 something to be " good " in a conventional sense which 
 does not in fact appeal to my feelings, I recognize it as 
 part of that which the general fabric of custom and 
 social opinion maintains. Thus the individual may 
 recognize a good that does not directly appeal to him, 
 and this possibility constitutes an essential part of the 
 whole moral problem, yet it will remain true to say that, 
 by the term " good " he signifies something which, in 
 the connexion in which it is applicable, moves feeling, 
 and through feeling disposes to action. 1 
 
 If this analysis is correct a judgment of the form " this 
 is good " is an assertion, but something more than an 
 assertion. Unless qualified by some saving clause that 
 makes it " good for some one else, but not for me," 
 " good from your point of view, but not from mine," it 
 is the expression of a practical attitude or disposition. 
 It is an acceptance of something propounded to the 
 mind, an acceptance which may be expressed in the 
 most general terms by saying that something fits in or 
 harmonizes with a mental disposition. This harmony 
 
 1 It is natural to say that we pursue an object because we deem 
 it good, but as our whole account of the relation of impulse and 
 intelligence will have shown, it is at least as true to say that we 
 deem it good because we have the impulse to pursue it. More 
 accurately, the idea of good is the definition o an impulse, or at 
 least of a practical attitude. What part ideas themselves play 
 in shaping our practical attitude is a question which runs 
 through all our discussion. In general the relation is reciprocal. 
 At lowest in the very act of defining we modify.
 
 68 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 has, generically, two aspects. It turns on feeling, and 
 it is effective in action. The two points are readily 
 observable in the simpler cases. Consider any simple 
 direct impulse, as the impulse of a little child to grasp 
 and handle a bright object. The impulse effects itself 
 in a series of efforts which may or may not culminate 
 in the momentary seizure of the thing. Neglecting the 
 latter case, and considering only that in which effort 
 is so far successful as to achieve contact, we still find 
 two strongly marked differences of result. If the bright 
 object is, say, a candle flame, the effort is abruptly broken 
 off and, so to say, reversed. There is a rapid withdrawal 
 of the hand accompanied by a cry, which we interpret 
 on the analogy of our more mature experience as an 
 expression of pain. Whether the pain is to be regarded 
 strictly as the cause of the withdrawal, as in ordinary 
 language we always assume, raises a well-worn meta- 
 physical controversy which we shall here endeavour 
 to avoid the question whether and in what sense a 
 feeling as a state of consciousness can be the cause 
 of a physical change. It will suffice for our purpose 
 to regard the process of sharp withdrawal, crying, and 
 other convulsive motor contractions on the one hand, 
 and the feeling of disappointment and pain on the other, 
 as a whole of many elements wherein the element of 
 feeling appears, at any rate on and after a certain stage 
 of development, to be an integral and essential factor. 
 The whole phenomenon observed or interpreted by us 
 on the one side in terms of feeling, on the other in terms 
 of certain movements of limbs, appears to form a con- 
 nected totality, and we emphasize the principal differences 
 of aspect in this totality by calling it a psycho-physical 
 process. In the psycho-physical process, then, of a 
 baby trying to grasp a candle flame we suppose two 
 essential characters. On the one hand there is effort 
 broken off, frustrated in the moment of achievement. 
 There is, that is to say, disharmony between the effort 
 and its end. On the other hand there is pain felt in 
 the moment of disharmony, and essential thereto. Pain
 
 THE GOOD 69 
 
 characterizes the feeling involved in disharmony, and the 
 mental attitude concerned in the process of checking 
 and cancelling effort. 
 
 The inverse case is now readily intelligible. If the 
 object grasped is neither too hot, nor too sharp, nor too 
 rough, the first contact is only the beginning of fruition. 
 The little fingers explore the surface, and they close on 
 it and convey it to the mouth, where, unless the process 
 is broken off by the arbitrary intervention of a higher 
 power, a new experience begins, which will differ again, 
 according as the object turns out to be a sugar plum or 
 a marble. The effort in the case now under consideration 
 is not checked in the moment of attainment. The ball 
 is explored all over, thrown about, and again pursued. 
 The sugar plum is tasted, sucked, and swallowed. The 
 series of actions which the effort sets a-going proceeds 
 to a definite end, 1 and is encouraged so to proceed in the 
 successive stages of attainment. There is a harmony 
 between the effort and its result, and the feeling involved 
 in the harmony is one of pleasant tone, culminating in 
 satisfaction. By harmony is meant, in the last analysis, 
 a form of mutual support. Generally speaking, it is 
 that relation of parts in a whole in virtue of which they 
 maintain and (if they admit of development) further 
 one another. 3 Thus in the case of pleasurable emotion, 
 
 1 Or, in the alternative, it is continued as long as the interest 
 is maintained. As this gives way to fatigue the object ceases to 
 stimulate effort and the effort ceases to yield pleasure. The end 
 in such a case, though not precisely definite, has its conditions, 
 either (i) in the nature of the thing which ceases to be interesting 
 when examined on all sides, when we have, as common phrase 
 testifies, " exhausted " it ; or (2) in subjective fatigue, any given 
 faculty of our own being capable of working at its best but for 
 a limited time. In either event the pleasurable activity main- 
 tains itself till certa n natural limits are reached at which it 
 gradually or rapidly ceases to be pleasurable, and even becomes 
 unpleasant. 
 
 * The mutual relation is essential to the meaning of harmony 
 as used here. It is to be carefully distinguished from the mere 
 subordination of parts to a whole (see below, chap, vi, p. 100 ff). 
 
 One of its simplest and most perfect examples is seen in those
 
 70 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 incipient fruition furthers the effort until its achievement 
 is complete, while the maintenance of the effort is, in 
 turn, the condition of full fruition. 
 
 3. But neither pleasure or pain on the one hand, nor 
 this internal harmony on the other, have an antecedent 
 effort as their invariable and necessary condition. If 
 the candle touched the child's hand accidentally, the 
 withdrawal would be none the less rapid and the pain 
 none the less sharp. If the sugar plum was put into the 
 mouth by maternal fingers it would be sucked with no 
 less avidity. It takes a philosophic mind to overlook 
 facts so simple as these. Feeling does not merely super- 
 vene upon effort, but may initiate effort, and while 
 pleasure in an experience prompts us to maintain it and 
 carry it through to some culminating satisfaction, pain 
 urges us to be rid of it. In the most passive states, such 
 as enjoyment of warmth or contemplation of a beautiful 
 
 efforts of art in which the beauty of parts lends beauty to the whole 
 and at the same time derives an enhanced beauty therefrom. In 
 
 " A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard 
 In springtime from the cuckoo-bird 
 Breaking the silence of the seas 
 Among the furthest Hebrides," 
 
 each line, at any rate each of the three last lines, is beautiful by 
 itself, but much more beautiful when read with the rest, and the 
 same thing may be said of the four lines together in relation to 
 the whole poem. In Helen's lament over Hector the lines 
 
 " a\Xa tru TOV y' iirftvffi Trapai<J3npevoQ KarepvKfQ 
 fff) T ayavofypoavvr) KOI aoiq ayavoiq iirftaaiv" 
 
 stand out from the rest by a beauty of their own, but the higher 
 values of this beauty they owe to the situation the tribute to 
 the habitual gentleness of the fighting chief who lies dead. These 
 are good instances of harmony because each part gives something 
 to and takes something from the remainder. When Abt Vog er 
 boasts that out of three sounds he makes " not a fourth sound 
 but a star," the case is not quite so clear, as the separate notes are 
 of little account in themselves, and seem to be merged in the whole. 
 I will not here pursue the question of the relation of beauty 
 to harmony into its intricacies, but will remark only that at any 
 rate in Ethics it is essential to distinguish between the harmony 
 of elements and the subordination of one to another. This is a 
 point to which we shall frequently have to recur.
 
 THE GOOD 71 
 
 view, we yield ourselves willingly to the experience until 
 some distraction occurs or strain and fatigue ensue. 
 That is, the pleasurable state tends to maintain itself 
 as long as it is pleasurable, while from the unpleasant 
 state we recoil. 1 The pleasurable state, that is, is inter- 
 nally harmonious, the painful is self-disruptive, even though 
 conditions of the environment or of the psycho-physical 
 organization constantly overcome the disruption and 
 keep us on the rack. 
 
 Thus in either case the character of the state gives 
 rise to a conation if it be only in the form of attention, 
 tending either to maintain, modify, or annul it. If there 
 is not defined effort in the sense of a series of actions so 
 co-ordinated as to secure an end which was not realized 
 when the series began, there is the conational force or 
 stress on which effort rests. In the pleasurable experience, 
 
 1 It may be objected that there are, e.g. melancholy moods 
 in which we wilfully persist and are roused to active hostility by 
 cheerful suggestions and hints of consolation. The cause of this 
 is, sometimes, that we feel the comfort to be unreal, and its false 
 light only serves to make our darkness more visible. Sometimes 
 our melancholy is not very deep and, like most feelings which in 
 general are of painful tone, a low grade sorrow has its pleasurable 
 side it is bitter-sweet 
 
 " Yet, Thyrsis, let me give my grief its hour 
 In the old haunt and find our tree-topped hill." 
 
 Sometimes, on the other hand, in a profound grief we feel that 
 there is something beyond any suffering of our own that is con- 
 cerned the payment of an emotional tribute to the lost which 
 we would not have stayed till it is discharged in full. But apart 
 from all this, we must distinguish between the inertia of a mood 
 which seeks (as though it were an independent being) to conserve 
 itself, and the maintenance of the conditions on which the mood 
 rests. These, if we see a chance, we are ready enough to remove. 
 Yet, even so, it will be said there are perverse people who cherish 
 their grievances and exhibit positive annoyance at their removal. 
 The explanation here is that the real source of trouble in such 
 cases is much deeper. It lies in something of which the unreason- 
 able being is himself perhaps unaware, and he catches on to this 
 or that petty annoyance, partly as a counter-irritant, partly (as 
 the psycho-analysts would tell us) to avert the danger of facing 
 his real demon.
 
 72 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 the incomplete impulse is confirmed, or the inchoate 
 state maintained. We respond, as we may say, to a 
 tentative experience with an affirmative. 1 We accept it 
 and go on with it. Now this is precisely the practical 
 attitude expressed in the judgment " This is good," and, 
 in point of fact, pleasurable feeling quite naturally 
 expresses itself in that form, or in some equivalent. On 
 the face of the facts, then, we might say that the pleasure 
 or satisfaction concerned in enhancing an effort, or 
 prolonging and accentuating an experience is the equivalent 
 in feeling of the assertion that the object of the effort 
 or the content of the experience is good. Feeling is the 
 required element which disposes to action and expresses 
 itself in the judgment. 
 
 But in reality this simple and untroubled identification 
 of the pleasurable and the good only holds under some- 
 what narrow conditions. Our first impulsive judgment a 
 expressing the feeling immediately attending on an 
 experience, may be corrected by a maturer judgment 
 expressing the result of a wider experience. Thus, prima 
 facie, judgment and feeling may fall apart. 
 
 But the maturer judgment also rests upon feeling, 
 though not necessarily a feeling of the same kind. For 
 example, we flinch from a pain and our sensory feeling 
 
 * The relation of desire to assertion is described by Plato 
 (Republic, Bk. IV, 437, Tr. Davies and Vaughan) : 
 
 "... would you not say that the mind of a man under the 
 influence of desire always either seeks after the object of desire, 
 or attracts to itself that which it wishes to have ; or again, so far 
 as it wills the possession of anything, it assents inwardly thereto, 
 as though it were asked a question, longing for the accomplishment 
 of its wish ? 
 
 I should. 
 
 Again : shall we not class disinclination, unwillingness, and 
 dislike under the head of mental rejection and repulsion, and of 
 general terms wholly opposed to the former ? 
 
 Unquestionably. ' ' 
 
 1 I need not here discriminate the cases of true purposive action 
 where the end is previously represented in idea, from those of 
 impulse in which action is directed to an end which is not formulated. 
 What I am saying applies to both cases alike.
 
 THE GOOD 73 
 
 approves. But immediately upon doing so we condemn 
 our action as unmanly. This expresses a feeling of very 
 different origin and significance, but whatever its origin 
 and significance the points that I would insist on here 
 are, that it is a feeling ; that it expresses itself in a 
 judgment ; and that it affects behaviour, tending to 
 correct, modify, or reverse action if it is of painful tone, 
 and to complete and confirm action if it is of pleasurable 
 tone. Further, the behaviour of others arouses corre- 
 sponding feelings within us, and our expression of such 
 feelings has an effect on others comparable to the effect 
 on ourselves. If we judge an act good, if we praise or 
 approve it sincerely, it is that it stirs some responsive 
 feeling within us, and the effect of the expression of our 
 approval is to maintain the action so judged, to stimulate 
 the doer to carry it through, and to persist in conduct 
 of the same type. If we judge it bad, the reverse tendencies 
 ensue. Thus, the pleasurable feelings * expressed in 
 
 1 A cynic might suggest here that, if it is a question of pleasure, 
 many of us derive more satisfaction from the failings and delin- 
 quencies of neighbours than from their good deeds. The existence 
 of this serious disharmony in our moral nature cannot be denied. 
 If we trace it to its roots we find a certain exaltation of self in the 
 spectacle of another's weakness and a corresponding depression 
 in the evidence of his superiority. Hence the joy over the sinner, 
 not because he repents but because he has occasion for repenting. 
 But the foundation of this ugly joy is the knowledge that what 
 he has done is hateful. It is because his act raises emotions of 
 aversion which are disagreeable emotions that he has lowered 
 himself. It may be objected that the witness who can after 
 all take secret pleasure in this cannot feel a very whole-hearted 
 aversion to the act. But if the act was not one to which society 
 on the whole feels a decided aversion there would be no occasion 
 for his unholy glee. 
 
 There is also a stern satisfaction in the repression and punish- 
 ment of wrong-doing which, if not the highest attitude conceivable, 
 is immune to the charge of cynicism. But the satisfaction here 
 lies in the active operation against the ugly thing in which the 
 emotion discharges itself. A bad act, then, excites feelings which 
 tend to repress or punish it (and so repress acts of that type). This 
 repressive tendency is indeed as effective in the malicious joy of 
 the cynic as in the stern reprobation of the just. In every case, 
 any pleasurable satisfaction in condemnation is pleasure experi-
 
 74 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 judgments of approval, and the displeasurable feelings 
 expressed in judgments of disapproval, react upon the 
 modes of behaviour which excite them, tending to 
 support them in the one case and correct them in the 
 other. Good and bad, in their moral as in their sensory 
 application, signify a harmony or disharmony between 
 feeling and action, and in this relation the feeling of one 
 man may, through its expression, affect the actions of 
 another. 
 
 What is good, these cases show, must be something 
 appealing to some one's feeling, whose feeling in particular 
 there is nothing yet to decide. Only if two or more 
 people use the word with a common significance there 
 must be modes of experience (under which generic term 
 of course observed and reported actions are included) 
 which appeal to them in the same way, and the feeling 
 of one person must have some bearing on, or at least 
 some meaning for, the thought of another. To that 
 extent the term " good," in its mere usage, seems to 
 require some objective meaning. What the conditions 
 
 enced in repressing the cause of the emotion. Thus there is a 
 disharmony between the bad act and the feeling that it excites, 
 less direct than the felt unpleasantness of the act itself, but no 
 less complete. 
 
 It must be added that, apart from the element of pleasure in- 
 volved in the repressive processes, the emotions of disapproval 
 are in reality of unpleasant character. This is easily seen when 
 we contemplate a wrong which we are powerless to avert. The 
 thwarted emotion then becomes acutely painful. It may be argued 
 that this is only because it is thwarted, not because it is an intrin- 
 sically painful emotion. It must be replied that it is only painful 
 emotions that increase in intensity with thwarting. The thwarting 
 of a pleasurable emotion is the cancelling of or interference with its 
 object. This does not make it more pleasurable. The thwarting 
 of a painful emotion is rather in the maintenance of the object 
 which excites it and the hindrance of the efforts which it makes 
 to transform or abolish that object. It is true that the anger 
 which can express itself adequately is barely a painful state, any 
 more than the hunger which is not excessive and has the near 
 prospect of a good meal to stay its cravings. There is none of the 
 stress which is essential to serious pain. But there is a fount of 
 painful feeling which rapidly wells up into stress if relief is
 
 THE GOOD 75 
 
 and implications of such objectivity are, we shall enquire 
 later. We have only first to sum up what we have so 
 far inferred as to the meaning of good. What is good 
 appears, generically, as an element of experience which 
 is in harmony with feeling. The experience may be 
 what we call an impulse or action of our own, or of others, 
 it may be a sensation or an idea, it may be the experience 
 of some outer object, of a beautiful scene, a bright warm 
 fire, an event of public interest. Further, since feeling 
 too, is an element of experience, it would seem that what 
 is good may be itself a feeling. To this point we shall 
 return immediately. Meanwhile we insist that any act, 
 or any object, simple or complex, near or remote, which 
 stirs feeling, may form the content of an " experience " 
 of the kind which we call good or bad. In judging an 
 experience good, so far as the judgment is truly our own, 
 and not a recognition of the judgment effectively passed 
 by some one else, we express towards it a mode of feeling 
 which may generically be called favourable ; that is 
 to say, it has the generic character of pleasure. This 
 
 refused. Emotions of which this is true are to be termed generically 
 painful. 
 
 No study of particular men in particular cases, however, gets 
 to the root of the question. The fundamental point is this. In 
 so far as the emotion which the act of another excites is distorted, 
 whether by self-feeling or any other cross-current, it is corrected 
 in the normal decent man by the settled principle of the will which 
 supports the common good as he understands it. At the back 
 of the will lies (according to our analysis in chap, ii) the system 
 of feeling in which our permanent happiness and unhappiness are 
 involved. It is rather to this deeper source of feeling than to 
 the emotions of the moment that our constant support of the 
 common good owes its strength. The good act, that is to say, 
 whether of self or another, is part of the system in which the 
 happiness of the self is involved. It is at this deeper level that 
 the stable conditions of harmony are reached. Thus the pleasur- 
 able element in approval is in accord with the permanent body 
 of feeling and may be said to represent it in consciousness, while 
 any unpleasurable element is out of harmony with the permanent 
 conditions of feeling. It is from this point of view, in the last 
 resort, that we are justified in describing approval as pleasurable, 
 and disapproval as displeasurable.
 
 76 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 feeling, so far as it finds expression, tends to maintain 
 the type of experience to which it refers, to carry it on 
 to completion, to intensify it, and to facilitate its repetition, 
 and this it does now by its action within the mind of 
 each person who feels it, and now by the effect of its 
 expression as praise or blame on the mind and behaviour 
 of others. This may be expressed by saying that the 
 experience judged good is in harmony with feeling. What 
 is judged bad similarly excites unfavourable feeling of 
 painful tone tending to arrest and annul it. That is, it 
 involves disharmony with feeling. 
 
 4. But we not only judge objects and efforts in terms 
 of feeling. We also judge feelings themselves. We call 
 " bad " not only the thing that gives the pain, but 
 the pain itself. What does this judgment express ? In the 
 simplest cases it expresses the conations pivoted on the 
 feeling, struggling with it or welcoming and surrendering 
 to it, seeking to avert or procure it. Secondarily, it may 
 express a feeling about the feeling, and it may be noted 
 that the second feeling is not always in harmony with 
 the first. We may rejoice that we have rejoiced, but we 
 may also be ashamed of having done so, or even in the 
 present tense of doing so, and we may be glad that we 
 mourn. The judgment appraising the feeling, then, is 
 not the same thing as the feeling itself, but is the expres- 
 sion of conations relevant to it or of other feelings which 
 it excites. Thus, feeling is good or bad according as it 
 is in harmony or disharmony with conation, or with 
 another feeling. Thus, in any case, what is good is a 
 harmony between some element of experience and a 
 feeling, but where the experience is conational the 
 relation may be seen from either end. Viewed from 
 the side of feeling the experience is held good, viewed 
 from the side of conation, the feeling. 1 
 
 But while either term of the relation may be legitimately 
 qualified as " good " or " bad," it is a fallacy to treat 
 
 1 Equally, if both terms are feelings, either may be held good as 
 viewed from the other. If the " element of experience " is neither 
 a feeling nor a conation, no such reciprocity applies (see below).
 
 THE GOOD 77 
 
 this character as independent of the relation in which 
 it stands to the other term. The course of action, or, 
 more generally, the experience which leaves feeling cold 
 is indifferent. To put a value on it sincerely is to express 
 a feeling about it. The feeling which stirs no conative 
 reaction stands in no organic relation to our nature, and 
 if such a feeling can be, it is without significance. It 
 is the reaction upon the feeling that we express in our 
 judgments. It would seem, then, that the judgment 
 always " expresses " one term of the relation, but is 
 explicitly concerned with the other. This prompts us 
 to look for the essential good now in one term, now in 
 the other, but not in both. On this line of thought, if 
 we take the object of feeling as a self-contained good, 
 we arrive at absolutist systems of ethics which tend 
 to ignore human happiness, and if we take feelings in the 
 same way we arrive at hedonistic systems in which 
 acts, character, and objects of feeling generally sink to 
 mere means. The nature of the fallacy and the true 
 solution come into view when we recall that the judgment 
 ' This is good " is not only the expression of an attitude, 
 but also the assertion of a fact, and the fact which it 
 asserts is a harmony between an experience and a feeling. 
 In describing anything as good we are at once taking 
 up a practical attitude towards it and asserting a harmo- 
 nious relation of which it is one term. The term may 
 legitimately be called good as pertaining to this harmony, 
 but the concrete truth involves both terms in that relation. 
 " Good," then, is a harmony of experience and feeling 
 in the generic senses described, and any element feeling 
 or other experience that enters into this harmony is 
 called good by right of membership.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 i. IF the good is generally a harmony of experience with 
 feeling what is the rational good ? In accordance with 
 our general definition of the rational we shall expect the 
 rational good in the first place to be consistent throughout. 
 That is to say, whatever is reasonably held good must 
 not tend to clash with anything else that is reasonably 
 held good. Just as two rational judgments must not 
 contradict one another, so two rational purposes must not 
 conflict with one another, and if two kinds of experience, 
 both apparently good, are found to conflict, it becomes 
 necessary to seek some means of reconciling the contra- 
 diction. Of the problem thus set to the practical reason 
 we shall speak presently. But let us observe now in the 
 second place that negative consistency is not enough. 
 Whether we think of the judgment " This is Good " as 
 an assertion or as the expression of an impulse-feeling it 
 must, to be rational, have a ground, and the ground must 
 be universal. The end or act or feeling that is good as 
 such must be good wherever and in whomsoever found, 
 and that which is good under given conditions must be 
 good wherever these conditions obtain. But further, if 
 we have to find grounds for these universals grounds 
 for our grounds we shall be pushed along the same line 
 of criticism as before in dealing with cognition. Principles 
 that figure as immediate and self-evident will be seen 
 themselves to require a ground, 1 and the ground which 
 
 1 If it has to be admitted on the theoretic side that acceptance 
 of first principles as self-evident is dependent on our mental con- 
 stitution, it is much more easily seen on the practical side that 
 
 78
 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD 79 
 
 will be found if they are valid is the fact that they sum 
 up and generalize more specific and concrete ends so far 
 as these are mutually consistent. Thus here, as in theory, 
 we shall look to Interconnexion as itself the rational 
 principle, only that here the interconnexion must involve 
 the practical operation of purposes along with the specu- 
 lative truth of judgments. For the judgments, being the 
 expression each of a practical attitude, cannot consist 
 with one another unless their practical results consist 
 with one another. Thus in action as in theoretic state- 
 ment the rational good forms a connected whole, in which 
 no part is isolated but in the end every element involves 
 every other. This postulates (i) a harmony of feeling 
 with feeling. To be rational all the feelings expressed 
 in judgments of the good must work together as elements 
 in a single harmonious body of feeling. And since the 
 good is generically a harmony of experience with feeling, 
 it postulates for its achievement (2) a harmony of all 
 experience x of all sentient beings with this body of 
 feeling, as that which maintains this body of feeling 
 and is maintained by it. 
 
 Thirdly, the rational good is Objective. The meaning 
 of this requirement is most easily seen in the negative 
 form that the judgment of the good must not depend on 
 any peculiarity of the individual who forms it. But here 
 a caution is required. It is true that to be rational the 
 subjective factor must be in a sense eliminated. But 
 even in the world of knowledge we had to be careful in 
 limiting and defining this sense. Knowledge is and 
 remains something " subjective " in the sense that it is 
 enjoyed by " subjects " and is a function of their nature. 
 What must be eliminated is any peculiarity of the sub- 
 jective factor which disturbs the appreciation of objective 
 reality. So here, the feeling expressed in any practical 
 judgment is the feeling of a subject. What must be 
 eliminated is any peculiarity of feeling which is incom- 
 
 feeling which is admittedly essential to the judgment of value 
 is a function of the psychological structure. 
 1 That is, of course, so far as it affects feeling.
 
 80 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 patible with the universal relations involved in the rational 
 system. The " objectivity " of the good is merely one 
 aspect of its universality. One feeling is not to be 
 preferred to another because it is the feeling of this man 
 rather than that, except in so far as the preference is 
 required on universal principles which are integral parts 
 of the general system of harmony. Thus I am justified 
 in caring much more for my child's happiness than for 
 that of somebody else's child, if the parental affections 
 are contributory elements to the rational good. But I 
 am not justified in carrying the preference to a point at 
 which it inflicts wrong on another, i.e. violates some rule 
 equally necessary to the rational good. The body of 
 feeling that has to be harmonized is the body of feeling 
 experienced or capable of being experienced in any sentient 
 beings whose behaviour may affect one another, and the 
 contradictions and conflicts that arise within this world 
 of feeling have to be reconciled, explained and resolved 
 just as in the world of knowledge, before a rational harmony 
 is reached. Thus the rationality of the good involves its 
 impartial and consistent application to the world of 
 sentient existence. That is to say, it is the function of 
 the rational impulse in practice to embrace this world in a 
 single system of purposes, just as it is the function of the 
 rational in cognition to embrace the world of experience 
 in a single system of thought. Not merely the recognition 
 of fundamental similarity in the life of others but the 
 practical comprehension of all living experience within a 
 single system of purposes is the essential work of the 
 rational in the sphere of action. 
 
 2. This system involves a double 'harmony, harmony 
 of the mind with itself and harmony of the mind with the 
 world, and in both relations the mind has to bend and be 
 bent in order to attain its good. The nerve of the process 
 is feeling which issues from and into impulses, controlling 
 and controlled by, supporting and supported by activity, 
 and the harmony of activity rests accordingly on a harmony 
 of feeling. Now each element of activity or experience 
 which any mind finds good has its harmony within,
 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD 81 
 
 sustaining, if only for the moment, and sustained by a 
 receptive and operative feeling. But harmonious as it 
 is within it may be inharmonious without, destroying 
 or destroyed by other activities each equally at harmony 
 within itself. This contrast may be repeated indefinitely 
 on a growing scale. A great body of vital activity, 
 including a large sphere of life and a great number of 
 beings, may be internally harmonious, and yet hostile 
 to another such body. Now the rational principle is that 
 which persistently extends the harmony, enlarging the 
 view, resolving contradictions, penetrating to deeper 
 sources of unity. How this can be we shall enquire further 
 at a later stage, but unless it can be there is no rational 
 good and no right. Granting for the moment that it can 
 be, we find that we mean by " Good " a harmony of 
 vital experience with feeling, that what we so deem good 
 at one moment or from one point of view, we may also 
 deem bad at another moment, or from another point of 
 view, that what we reasonably call good or what is really 
 good must be a harmony of the totality of feeling with the 
 totality of experience so far as it affects feeling. Thus 
 the Practical Reason is the effort of the mind towards 
 harmony within itself, and with nature. This harmony 
 the mind does not find, but creates, or rather let us say 
 that it finds it in dying cadences and catches of which 
 it seeks to make a music universal. 
 
 3. But, it may be asked, is it clear that the universalism 
 of the Practical Reason follows from our premisses ? 
 Might there not be some partial point of view from which 
 a system answering all our rational tests could be worked 
 out ? For example there is, it may be said, a consistent 
 egoism. I judge this to be good because it falls in with 
 my wishes. Something inconsistent with it falls in with 
 your wishes and is judged good by you. But what is 
 that to me ? I must admit that if something, x, is really 
 good it is good universally and, therefore, for you as 
 well as for me. But this is not as it stands sufficient, 
 for I might contend that an essential element in x 
 essential to its goodness is precisely that it is mine, a 
 
 6
 
 82 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 fulfilment of my wishes. Carrying this right through life 
 I get a consistent order of action and judgments about 
 action, viz., that all are good which fit into a system, 
 consistent in theory and practice, of my judgments, 
 my actions, and my feelings. Thus, ideally, egoism might 
 be internally self -consistent. On the other hand, the 
 principle of universals as a merely cognitive principle 
 will at least compel me to admit that you will form a 
 similar system for yourself and that these systems may 
 clash. If, then, both systems are rational, rational systems 
 may be inconsistent, which is contrary to definition. 
 If I hold mine alone to be rational, what is the basis of 
 the difference which I allege between two similar systems ? 
 If I assert without ground that what I think or feel is 
 preferable to what others think or feel, that is arbitrary 
 and, therefore, by definition, irrational. It follows that 
 there must be a ground for my preference, and if self- 
 preference is itself a ground, it will justify your self- 
 preference as well as mine, grounds being universal. 
 Thus the principle of self-preference whether of an 
 individual or a group involves inconsistencies and is by 
 definition irrational. 
 
 4. At this point we shall be asked whether, after all, 
 our demonstrations affect action in the smallest degree. 
 If there is a consistent egoism regardless of other people's 
 feelings, or, what is more real, a consistent group morality 
 indifferent or hostile to outsiders, why should it care 
 about any proof that its action is inconsistent with some 
 wider good ? Grant, for the sake of argument, that the 
 rational good is what we have taken it to be. Still it 
 may be said it will appeal only to those who happen to 
 make a rational life their end. If a man cares for none 
 of these things, who or what shall make him care ? As 
 to rationality, if a man adopts a certain end as his chief 
 good and then acts so as to defeat the end, he is clearly 
 inconsistent and absurd. So much we could probably 
 get him to acknowledge, and all would claim to be so 
 far rational that when they have adopted an end they 
 wish to carry it out and regard actions which conflict
 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD 83 
 
 with it as mistaken. Thus, given an end, reason has a 
 clear function to perform. But in the choice of ends or 
 principles it is otherwise. One principle, such as that 
 of harmony, may, indeed, be distinguished from others in 
 that it carries order and coherence through all life, whereas 
 other principles only carry them through partially. But 
 how does this affect choice ? It still remains open to any 
 of us to reject the rational, and no proof, except it be by 
 connexion with some end that we have actually chosen, 
 will affect our will. 
 
 Thus we are brought face to face with the question of 
 authority and obligation. We have to ask not merely 
 whether there is a rational good and whether we have 
 denned it correctly, but whether the rational good has 
 a claim upon us, and an indefeasible claim, over-riding 
 the promptings of subjective judgment. Now in the 
 ordinary conception of morality we encounter just such 
 a claim. The moral judgment imposes on us an obligation. 
 It says that this is right and that is wrong, this is what 
 you must, that what you must not do. It seems to 
 state a fact and also to impose a command. What is 
 the nature of the fact and what the basis of the command ? 
 Many would deny that the moral judgment makes any 
 direct statement of fact. True, they would say, it may 
 take the form " This course of action is right." But what 
 sort of a thing is Tightness ? It is not a quality of an 
 action or a circumstance in the sense in which squareness 
 is a quality of this table or swiftness of a body in motion. 
 What the word imports is simply that the thing should 
 be done, and the proposition is accordingly a command 
 to do it. There are certainly facts in the background, 
 e.g. the desire of some one that the thing should be done, 
 and the possible consequences if it is not done. But the 
 words themselves are really not a statement but an order, 
 and even the facts which they imply are of the nature of 
 desires, resolves, sentiments, bearing upon and tending 
 to issue in action. 
 
 We are, then, on this view, to take the moral judgment 
 as, in essence, a command. Let us leave for the moment
 
 84 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 the question whether it is or is not an assertion of fact, 
 and consider it as a command. Who, then, commands, 
 who is commanded, and, above all, on what authority 
 does the command repose ? The first two questions were 
 answered once for all by Kant. In the moral judgment 
 proper it is the self which both commands and obeys. 
 When I do a thing that is right because it is right I do 
 it for a reason which I myself acknowledge as good, and 
 binding me because it is good. True, another may tell 
 me my duty, but if I obey him merely because he commands 
 that is not in itself a moral ground of action, while if I 
 conform because he convinces me, that again is acceptance 
 of a principle which I now acknowledge on my own account 
 as binding me. If this is so we begin to get an answer 
 to our third and most important question. The principle 
 which I accept as binding must be one that appeals to me 
 as a decisive ground of action, that is, one that overcomes 
 other grounds for other actions, it being just this supremacy 
 which the term " binding " expresses. 
 
 We become aware of such supremacy through conflict 
 with some other motive of action, and we are aware of 
 it not only in the moral but in the prudential sphere, and 
 indeed, as has been hinted, not only in action but in 
 cognition. Thus I may be constrained by cogent reasoning 
 to dismiss an opinion to which I am very strongly inclined. 
 I am constrained by prudence to avoid a dish which I 
 find very tempting, just as I am constrained by honesty 
 to admit a debt which it would be very convenient to 
 ignore. With essential differences there is also an essential 
 point of agreement between the three cases. In one I 
 am convinced that, however strongly appearances may 
 suggest, say, that the fields are rising and falling, in 
 reality it is the aeroplane that is " banking " while the 
 fields are stationary. In another I am certain that 
 the evils of ill health are really so great as to outweigh the 
 momentary satisfaction of appetite, and I am certain of 
 this and guided by my certainty, although the felt impulse 
 of appetite may be much keener and more vivid than any 
 representation of future ill consequences. In the last
 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD 85 
 
 case, though I may be just as keenly tempted by oppor- 
 tunities of evasion, I feel that it would be " really " bad 
 and not good. What is common to the three cases, then, 
 is the insistence on something " real " as opposed to 
 something " apparent " in the case of action on some- 
 thing " really " bad, though " apparently " good. This 
 seems to bring us back after all to the view that the moral 
 judgment does assert a fact of some kind. But again, 
 without pursuing this question, let us try to complete 
 our analysis of its import as a command. In the first 
 place it propounds a principle or end or ground of action. 
 As a general term for such grounds we have used the term 
 " good," since we took it that everything that appears to 
 us as a motive for action also appears, at least provision- 
 ally, as good. The moral judgment, then, propounds to 
 me something as good, but it also claims supremacy for 
 this " good " over any other that appeals to me even 
 though that other may admittedly be " really " good, 
 so far as it goes, or would be good if it did not happen 
 in this case to conflict with something superior to it. 
 Further, this supremacy is claimed for the rule of action 
 as such. The moral principle does not allege that the 
 actual inclination to obey it is greater than the contrary 
 inclination. But it bids us obey, no matter what our 
 inclinations may be. Such, then, is the nature of the 
 moral command, and the question is whether it is a 
 reasonable command. 
 
 Observe first that there is no more difficulty in applying 
 the test of rationality to a command than to an assertion. 
 We can easily see that commands are unreasonable if 
 they are in conflict with one another or if they are 
 arbitrary, that is ungrounded. Conversely, commands are 
 reasonable so far as they are consistent and grounded, 
 and this, as our analysis has shown, will mean in effect 
 in so far as they prescribe a harmonious system of ends 
 to be pursued. Observe, secondly, that there is no 
 difficulty in the opposition of the command to the felt 
 inclination. Even a rule of prudence involves as much 
 as this, the dull weight of permanent interests overcoming
 
 86 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 the vivid inclination of which we are most intensely 
 conscious in our feeling. Into the psychology of such 
 struggles we need not enter for the moment. It is sufficient 
 that they prove that, by whatever means, the inclination 
 which is most intensely felt in consciousness may neverthe- 
 less be overcome. The more serious difficulty begins when 
 we remember that in matters of prudence, inclination 
 and interest after all stand on the same platform. Both 
 appeal to the same self ; nor do they necessarily suggest 
 any qualitative distinction between the different interests 
 of the self. The moral judgment, on the other hand, does 
 make qualitative distinctions. It does not recognize, that 
 is, that any amount of some other sort of good cancels 
 the bad involved in infringing its rule, and what is more, 
 though adopted and approved as a rule by the self for 
 the self, it ignores the individuality of the self in its 
 prescription, which maintains the goodness of a rule as 
 a universal and true for all selves placed in the circum- 
 stances, whatever they be, that the rule contemplates. 
 It is in principle indifferent to its truth whether the person 
 whom it contemplates accepts it or not. Just as the rule 
 of prudence holds for you whether you are inclined to 
 accept it or not your felt inclination making no difference 
 to the working out of causes and effects so the moral 
 rule holds good independently, not only of your felt 
 inclination, but of your most deliberate decision. It 
 applies to you. It holds of you, but it holds independently 
 of your will as well as your desire or your impulse. But 
 how can anything practical hold " of " me if no impulse, 
 no desire, no volition of mine urges me to it ? We have 
 admitted from the first that all actions rest on some 
 element of feeling. If, then, there is no responsive feeling 
 in me what meaning has moral obligation for me ? This 
 brings us finally face to face with the " fact " alleged by 
 the moral judgment. For the reply must be that it has 
 not been said that moral obligation holds " for " me in 
 the sense that it does in the case assumed make an appeal 
 to me. That would be a contradiction in terms. What 
 has been said is that it holds " of " me, that is, that there
 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD 87 
 
 is, in fact, an obligation which in the case assumed I 
 ignore. The analogy, again, is with the relation between 
 reality and opinion. A danger, for instance, is equally 
 there for the man who sees it and the man who does not 
 see it. It concerns him though he does not know it, 
 and the only sense in which we can take obligation to 
 hold " of " a man who does not recognize it, is that its 
 validity is independent of his knowledge and concerns 
 him though he does not know it. In what sense, then, 
 does obligation concern the man who does not appreciate 
 it ? The reply is that it concerns him as colour concerns 
 the blind man. He misses what is really good, the 
 goodness which stands the test of rational examination. 
 To the morally deficient the demonstration no more 
 brings practical conviction than an explanation of the 
 colour system gives sight to the blind. The moral impulses 
 are not created by exposition but must be there before 
 we can appeal to them. In the normal man, however, 
 such promptings exist, and assert themselves with varying 
 degrees of actual force against rebellious impulse. Thus 
 the sense of moral obligation is something real. When 
 it is asked whether moral obligation is a fact the question 
 cannot refer to the existence of this feeling. The question 
 is whether moral obligation is or is not something more 
 than a feeling irregularly diffused, both as to intensity and 
 direction among human beings, that is to say whether, 
 if we regard it as a command, the command is reasonable, 
 whether if we regard it as asserting a fact, the assertion 
 is true. Now what the moral law imposes on us as a 
 command is that we should follow a certain mode of 
 life as superior to any other so that not only is that mode 
 of life good, but anything that conflicts with it, however 
 attractive in itself, is bad, and what the moral judgment 
 asserts is the same superiority put not as a command, 
 but as an assertion of supreme goodness. The question 
 whether the command is valid or the assertion true is 
 the same question differently phrased, and comes back 
 to this : Is the moral judgment reasonable ? These 
 questions we have sought to determine by denning
 
 88 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 rationality, and we have come accordingly to the conclusion 
 that the belief that we owe allegiance to a wider life than 
 our own is justified in reason. For we found that a harmony 
 of feeling with experience extending to all beings that 
 feel, must be reasonably held good as conforming to the 
 definition of reason applied to practice. Hence the 
 feelings, whether they take the form of impulse, volition, 
 exhortation, or command, prompting to the support or 
 development of such harmony, are reasonable. They are 
 mutually consistent, give each other support and are of 
 universal application. Conversely, opposed principles are 
 reasonably held bad. If our argument is sound it follows 
 that the attitude of will which accepts a moral obligation 
 is a rational attitude, and the assertion implied in that 
 acceptance a true assertion. I would add that even if 
 our view of the rational and the good be rejected, I should 
 doubt whether any other form could be given to the 
 problem of moral obligation. Is the feeling rational or 
 not ? Does it rest on reality or not ? All these are the 
 same question in different forms. Possibly others may 
 suggest other forms which would prove more convenient, 
 but whatever the form, I suggest that the real issue is 
 the same the capacity of the feeling of obligation which 
 we experience to stand the test which proves it reasonable. 
 The question, it will have been seen, turns on a due 
 appreciation of the bearing of reason upon action, and 
 it conies to a head in connexion with the " transpersonal 
 reference " which is the main theoretical crux, as it is 
 also the practical difficulty in morals. Some, misled by 
 an unduly narrow view of rationality, have identified 
 reason with prudence and conceived all altruism as based 
 on supernatural motives. Others have identified the work 
 of the Reason in this regard with the intellectual admission 
 of the essential identity of human beings and the equal 
 value of the good which all can enjoy. Others, again, 
 have seen in the Practical Reason an authority over-riding 
 mere impulse and impelling the emotional human subject 
 to conform to law. On the view here taken every judgment 
 of the good involves the existence of an impulse-feeling
 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD 89 
 
 directed towards it. To recognize some act or experience 
 of another as good is, therefore, not merely an intellectual 
 judgment, but a judgment imbued with a tone of feeling 
 towards that act or experience. But we recognized among 
 the mass of impulses a certain correlation which, in its 
 simplest forms, makes for unitary control and, in its 
 more rational form, for harmony. This tendency we can 
 speak of as a specific impulse towards harmony, but we 
 must note that it is an impulse among impulses, qualifying 
 and reshaping them. In virtue of this movement our 
 impulses become an organized body overcoming recal- 
 citrant movements, however intensely felt, by the power 
 of an organized mass. This organization, consistently 
 and intelligently carried through, is the practical reason 
 which is the mass of impulse-feeling harmonized, or in 
 process of finding harmony. 
 
 5. But, while the Practical Reason is an impulse and 
 its work creative, it is also the recognition of a fact and 
 its creation is solidly based on a reality. Its effort towards 
 a harmony of all experience for all mind would have no 
 meaning if there were not, as matter of hard fact, a certain 
 unity actually pervading all mind. In requiring harmony 
 between any two impulses, the practical reason is assuming 
 that there is a relation between the two spheres to which 
 they belong. If, indeed, they collide in practice so that 
 in following one we frustrate the other this relation needs 
 no proof. But the requirement of the reason goes beyond 
 these cases. As reason its judgments take the shape 
 of universals and what is good or bad for it is good or bad 
 universally, that is to say wherever precisely similar 
 conditions are found. Fundamentally we have seen that 
 the condition of goodness is harmony between experience 
 and feeling within a mind, and the universality of this 
 principle and of every judgment applying it is the assertion 
 of a certain unity of mind wherever found. This unity 
 has two characteristics. On the one hand it includes that 
 fundamental similarity of character which is the basis 
 of the universal judgment, on the other hand it includes 
 the social solidarity which is implied in any judgment of
 
 9 o THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 one man's conduct by its effect upon another. The 
 world of Practical Reason must be of one tissue throughout, 
 in the double sense that its character is fundamentally 
 alike all through and that its parts, as far as intercourse 
 extends, are all interconnected. It is this unity of 
 which we are obscurely conscious in the sense of moral 
 obligation. The relation of our individual self, our 
 particular act to the whole is what we know as duty. 
 The conformity of any act with the system required by 
 the whole is what we know as its Tightness, and since all 
 these terms express or imply actual relations of a real 
 part to a real whole, the moral judgment is witness to the 
 real existence of an order which at the same time it seeks 
 to develop and perfect. 
 
 The unity which the Practical Reason finds in existence 
 differs from the harmony which it seeks to create in two 
 essentials. In the first place, mere physical barriers 
 obstruct and may completely sever intercourse, so that 
 until these are overcome the world in which it moves is 
 not that of all mind, but only (if the expression be allowed) 
 of all available mind. Secondly, within the circle of minds 
 that are in contact, i.e. the actual community, there is 
 every degree and kind of conflict and disharmony shot 
 through the pervading unity. The unity, however, is 
 always real and always operative in this tangible sense, 
 that no one part permanently escapes the consequences 
 of that which affects the rest, and the whole is affected 
 by the behaviour and suffering of any one part. The 
 development which each man can achieve is conditioned 
 in kind and degree by the development of others. Even 
 the man who succeeds in putting himself above others 
 must, willy-nilly, shape his own self accordingly, cherishing 
 this and oppressing that side of his nature, a truth 
 depicted in its extreme case by the Platonic tyrant 
 who turns out to be the sufferer from a tyranny within 
 his own soul a description of which biographers of 
 Abdul Hamid have given vivid contemporary illustration. 
 Particular acts may not indeed bring their appropriate 
 reward or penalty upon the doer, but in the main God is
 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD 91 
 
 not mocked, and through a thousand subtle interactions 
 the choice of a line of life entails the consequences which 
 it may seek to ignore or defeat. The unity is such that 
 the parts do and will interact, if not harmoniously then 
 with a greater or less degree of mutual perversion and 
 destruction. 
 
 6. On the view here taken of the Practical Reason it is 
 clear that not only the intellect, but the feelings, impulses 
 and emotions of human beings that make for a harmony 
 in life as a whole, may all be regarded as rational in char- 
 acter. But this does not, of course, mean that they are 
 acquired or even trained or developed by ratiocination. 
 They grow up originally, as all impulses grow, under the 
 conditions of heredity as determined by natural selection. 
 Far down in the animal state impulses appear which have 
 reference to the welfare of others. The parental instincts, 
 in fact the sex instinct, and, where it exists, the herd 
 instinct, are all impulses of this class. The psychophysical 
 organization grows up under environing conditions, physical 
 and social, to which it adapts itself in a rough and ready 
 way by response. These responses must, in accordance 
 with well-known biological conditions, be on the whole such 
 as will assist the survival of the individual and the stock. 
 That stock will survive and increase in which the behaviour 
 of component individuals is best adapted to the require- 
 ments of the mode of life which the stock enjoys ; this 
 adjustment of responses implies an adaptation of organ- 
 ization and feeling, and this organization as handed on 
 by heredity is the basis of instinct. In so far as the life 
 of the stock is social, that is in so far as it depends on 
 the interaction of individuals, their mutual forbearance 
 and mutual aid, their relations and behaviour affecting 
 them will accordingly become subjects of instinctive 
 feeling. The appreciation of such behaviour, at least as 
 soon as any complexity arises, will involve intelligence, 
 just as the appreciation of the bearing of any single act 
 on the welfare of the individual may involve intelligence. 
 Yet the feeling to which the act appeals when its bearings 
 have been worked out, may be of instinctive origin.
 
 92 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 Nor is it to be supposed that the social instincts are 
 restricted to the human race. Many of the lower animals 
 live under social conditions, and social, and particularly 
 parental instincts, are verifiable far down in the scale 
 of animal creation. Now anything that violates these 
 instincts is directly felt as bad, and what falls in with them 
 as good. It is possible that these judgments may be 
 reversed on appeal, just as the instinctive withdrawal 
 from physical pain may be overcome, and what we first 
 feel as bad we may be driven finally to accept as good. 
 But that is only to say that our immediate and unre- 
 flective impulse whether we call it an immediate judgment 
 or a spontaneous reaction of feeling may be overborne 
 by wider considerations. It does not affect the fact that 
 the feelings that bind us to others and overleap the 
 boundary of self are just as primary psychologically as 
 those which interest us in our own future. They are 
 rational in the sense that they are integral parts of a 
 rational synthesis, not in the sense that they are results 
 reached by a deductive reasoning, or by any other purely 
 intellectual process. They do, however, take intellectual 
 expression in judgments of value, and accordingly our 
 primary and unreflective ideas of what is good or bad 
 have reference to others as well as ourselves. We are not 
 to suppose that either logically or psychologically the 
 idea of good is first built up for ourselves alone, and then 
 transferred by analogical inference to other people. The 
 idea of good and for that matter the idea of self also 
 is formed by the interaction of mind on mind, and the 
 emotions and ideas which their play calls forth. The 
 " good " is what is accepted, approved or encouraged by 
 some one, not necessarily by self. As soon as the self 
 clearly recognizes its goodness that is tantamount to a 
 practical acceptance. To learn the meaning of the word 
 is to assimilate and fit on to our own feeling ideas that 
 are moving in the social life around us. Nor again can 
 we logically consider the good of others as formed 
 analogically upon the model of our own. What is in the 
 order of reason to be held good for me, is not finally
 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD 93 
 
 determinable apart from the good of others whom it will 
 affect. To suppose that I can definitely ascertain my 
 own good and proceed to the inference that the good of 
 every other person is like it, is unduly to simplify the 
 moral problem. As we shall see more fully later, self- 
 development is not as such an element in the social ideal, 
 but only such development as contributes to the harmony 
 of the social whole. 
 
 The reason of practice resembles the reason of theory 
 in that it is the endeavour to establish harmony through- 
 out its own world. But both in its nature and method 
 it differs in accordance with the difference of its problem. 
 Its world is the world of impulses, emotions, fixed purposes, 
 passions, all the vital activities of men, and it is within 
 this turbulent mass that it has to establish harmony. 
 For this purpose it must itself be charged with all the 
 energy of profound feeling, and its development is as much 
 a development of feeling as of thought. The preparatory 
 work is done by that unconscious growth which the con- 
 ditions of physical and, later, of social life make possible. 
 The later stages are carried through by an education in 
 which the conscious appreciation of the significance of 
 conduct and the bearings of behaviour in its complex 
 social relations plays an increasing part. But throughout, 
 the expansion of view and the refinement of ideals must 
 carry feeling along with them. Without a basis in feeling 
 the " rationality " of any unselfish action would be a 
 word without force. Without the notion of rationality 
 the mass of social feelings would be without cohesion, 
 guidance or unity of aim. Here, as elsewhere, the function 
 of the principle is interpretative. It is to make the impulse 
 understand itself. At the same time here, as elsewhere, 
 the interpretation deepens and strengthens the very 
 feeling which it serves. The wider sense of meaning and 
 purposiveness which the recognition of this rational 
 coherence lends to the social feelings, becomes the key- 
 stone of the arch among the feelings themselves. Reasoning 
 cannot put into men feelings that they do not possess, 
 but by directing, co-ordinating and giving unity and
 
 94 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 stability of aim it may most materially enhance the 
 working energy of feelings out of which it is itself 
 engendered. 
 
 7. The all-embracing harmony in which we found the 
 ideal of the practical reason is in strictness incapable of 
 complete realization. Experience is unlimited, and the 
 mind with its capacities for feeling is always in process of 
 " becoming " if not of growth. There is, therefore, so 
 far as human vision can see, no limit to the work of reason, 
 and no stage at which it will be able to rest on the 
 achievement of final harmony. The definition of the 
 rational good must take this limitation into account. 
 
 But once again, the case is closely analogous to that 
 of rational thought. There, too, we saw that, experience 
 being unlimited, the body of systematic thought is never 
 complete, and not only is it incomplete, but for that very 
 reason it is never final within its own sphere. It is always 
 theoretically liable to modification by new experiences 
 and new interpretations of experience. Thus, while it is 
 reasonable to maintain the system established by the 
 interconnexion of experience so far as it has gone, it is 
 equally reasonable to hold it liable to modification by 
 fresh experience, and it is reasonable in forming a con- 
 ceptual interpretation of reality as a whole to be for ever 
 seeking fresh experience to bring to bear on the thought- 
 constructions already made. Putting all these points 
 together we found that in the sphere of cognition itself 
 though the purpose is not to construct reality, but to 
 interpret a reality that already exists the reason ulti- 
 mately reveals itself as a conation or an impulse. It is the 
 impulse, not merely to interpret the experience that men 
 have actually accumulated, but to extend the synthesis 
 of thought to all possible experience. It is the organizing 
 principle in thought. In strict analogy the practical 
 reason is the organizing principle in the actions of men. 
 It is the impulse to develop harmony, on the one hand 
 by extending the control of mind over the conditions of 
 its life, on the other hand by establishing unity of aim 
 within the world of consciousness itself. The measure
 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD 95 
 
 of harmony so achieved at any given stage is not complete, 
 and its rules accordingly are not necessarily final. But 
 they are to be modified only in the interests of some 
 fuller harmony to which such a change will demonstrably 
 lead. What it is reasonable to hold good under any 
 given conditions is the harmony which is as perfect and 
 comprehensive as we can make it under these conditions, 
 which ignores no element which we can see to be relevant 
 and admits no conflict of which we are aware. Such a 
 system it is reasonable to hold good, but it is also 
 reasonable to recognize that its principles are liable to 
 revision, the system being one which not merely admits 
 of expansion but demands it. 
 
 This expansion, we have hinted, follows two main lines. 
 On the one hand, there is the development of harmony 
 within the world of feeling itself. On the other, there is 
 the endeavour through action upon the environment to 
 bring experience into harmony with the trend of feeling 
 as a whole. These two movements, when all their implica- 
 tions are understood, may be said to involve the whole 
 sphere of mental activity. They involve the development 
 of mind in all rational beings, and in all their mutual 
 relations to the point in which it can work in perfect 
 concert with itself, and they involve the extension of its 
 operations on every side in the organization of its life. 
 These considerations indicate the general direction in 
 which harmony is to be found, and it remains to follow 
 them up into some further detail, in order to form a 
 clearer conception of the nature of harmony, the conditions 
 on which it depends and the life in which it is realized.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THE REALIZED GOOD 
 
 i. To understand the structure of harmony we must 
 begin with its constituent atoms. That is to say we must 
 go back to the simple processes by which it is brought 
 step by step into relation with life as a whole. 
 
 We have seen how, in any particular case of its exercise, 
 an impulse is affected by the feelings to which it gives 
 rise, how it is furthered by pleasure and inhibited and 
 perhaps frustrated by pain. Now pleasure and pain have 
 effects which do not end with the particular experience 
 in which they arise. They modify our subsequent 
 behaviour, the pleasurable feeling tending to strengthen 
 any pre-existing impulse that led up to that feeling or 
 to create a desire where none existed before. We need 
 not for the moment enquire closely into the psychophysical 
 mechanism involved in this process, which is subtle, 
 complicated and difficult to analyse. We note only the 
 empirical fact. When an impulse results in a pleasurable 
 experience, the pleasure not only strengthens that par- 
 ticular impulse and carries it through to its completion, 
 but has a permanent effect such that when a similar 
 impulse is again suggested by the circumstances of the 
 organism, it is stronger than before, and may continue 
 by the same process to grow in strength till a maximum 
 point is reached. The opposite pair of effects may be 
 attributed to pain. Thus in the pleasurable experience 
 a double harmony is involved. There is the harmony 
 of impulse with feeling in any single case and the wider 
 harmony between numerically different impulses and 
 
 96
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD 97 
 
 feelings of the same class. The impulse in each case gives 
 rise to the experience to which the feeling is attached, 
 and the feeling confirms the impulse. In the case of 
 pain there is at first sheer disharmony the pain both 
 arrests the individual impulse which has given rise to it, 
 and tends to inhibit the subsequent formation of similar 
 impulses. The effect of this inhibition, however, if carried 
 far enough, is to suppress impulses of the type in question 
 and so reduce conscious disharmony to a minimum. 1 
 
 These relations suppose something permanent and yet 
 plastic which the feelings affect and by which the impulses 
 are formed and reformed. How this permanent element 
 which we call the self is to be conceived, what is its relation 
 on the one hand to the body, on the other to the experi- 
 ences of which we call it the subject, are metaphysical 
 questions which we shall here as far as possible avoid. 
 But our account, though it carries us but a very little 
 way into the life of the self, already forces us to conceive 
 it as something with a certain constitution or organization 
 of its own. That, at least, is the phrase in which we can 
 best sum up the facts. The self feels in a certain way. We 
 cannot regard this feeling as being put into it from with- 
 out. Even if we conceive it as due in part to the action 
 of external things, e.g. the prick of a pin, still the feeling 
 is the mode in which the self reacts to this stimulus. 
 It is so organized as to give this response to this stimulus. 
 The same may be said of its impulses and of the way in 
 which its impulses are modified by its feelings, and from 
 this modification it results that its organization is not 
 something fixed once for all at the beginning of its experi- 
 ence, but is capable of development. It not only has 
 impulses, experiences and feelings, but it tends to shape 
 or organize them into a harmony. So far as there is a 
 resultant harmony in our actions and experiences it is 
 the expression of the internal harmony of our organization. 
 So far as this internal harmony already exists the impulses 
 that we follow lead to pleasurable ends and these different 
 
 1 It does not, however, follow that all disharmony is overcome, 
 see below, p. 100 ft.
 
 98 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 ends are congruous with one another. So far as there is 
 disharmony between act and consequence there is dis- 
 harmony in the constitution of the self which the experience 
 itself tends to annul. The harmony that we express in 
 the judgment " This is good " even when this is the 
 immediate and unreflective utterance of feeling, may be 
 regarded as the harmony of an impulse or experience 
 with the organization of the self, and in this sense we 
 were justified in speaking of it as an acceptance. Finally, 
 this harmony of any act or experience with the inner 
 organization may be considered as the basis of any 
 harmony found between it and other acts or experiences. 
 If life consisted in the repetition of certain sets of actions 
 having nothing to do with one another, the matter would 
 end here. The questions of moral practice and moral 
 theory arise precisely because life is not so simple. The 
 experiences that appeal to the natural man are manifold, 
 and they are not mutually consistent. The life of impulse 
 viewed as a whole is not one of harmony, but of chaos. 
 The pleasure of one moment is the pain of another. Even 
 within the animal world we find this conflict giving rise 
 in the course of experience to a certain modification of 
 impulses. How precisely this modification may be brought 
 about at that stage is a question that need not concern 
 us here. What is essential for us, is to consider the 
 conditions of harmony in a mind capable of deliberately 
 comparing one experience with another, and viewing 
 them as a connected whole. Let us again suppose the 
 simplest case. Let us suppose the mind to have to deal 
 with two types of impulse and their attendant satisfactions, 
 and to find that in greater or less degree they conflict, 
 so that indulgence in the one is the destruction of the 
 other. We are to suppose further, that the mind in 
 question has no other interest except in these two directions, 
 so that apart from them we can, for our purposes, say 
 that it is not. Several alternative possibilities are pre- 
 sented by the case. One impulse may entirely overcome 
 the other. Its satisfaction is held good, and indulgence 
 in the rival impulse being an obstacle thereto, is held bad.
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD 99 
 
 In fact, the impulse itself by repeated inhibition may be 
 gradually suppressed. Of the mechanism of this process 
 I say nothing here, and I must not be taken as implying 
 that of any two impulses the stronger necessarily prevails. 
 I doubt whether this is true, except in a sense which 
 makes it quite valueless. Our object is merely to set 
 out the alternative methods of dealing with opposed 
 impulses. There is, then, in the case supposed, consis- 
 tency in action but a certain disharmony of feeling. If 
 the impulse is relatively superficial the disharmony may 
 be gradually worn away, though only at the cost of some 
 curtailment of the self. In proportion as the impulse is 
 deeply rooted, this process ceases to be possible and we are 
 left with an underlying disharmony in our lives. 1 Another 
 possibility is that the two impulses are equally matched, 
 and that the mind, having no further data to go by, is 
 unable to make a choice. In this case, harmony appears 
 impossible. Action must either swing inconsistently from 
 one pole to the other, or the mind must be reduced to a 
 kind of paralysis in which all interest and pleasure is 
 lost. But lastly a third alternative appears in which one 
 or both forms of impulse undergo a certain modification 
 whereby they become consistent. One of the impulses 
 we may suppose, to take the simplest case, is moderated 
 in intensity or guided towards one class of objects to 
 the exclusion of another, and so remodelled it is found 
 not less satisfying in itself, and fully consistent with the 
 indulgence of its former rival. In this case there is the 
 beginning of something akin to what we call character. 
 Conduct and experience react on raw impulse and re- 
 fashion it. They define its object and so bring it into 
 consistency, even into co-operation with the work of 
 other impulses similarly re-fashioned. Each impulse is, 
 in Aristotelian phrase, brought into the mean. In this 
 case the result is harmonious. There is restraint but 
 no excision. Both types of impulse and feeling subsist. 
 It will be seen that this solution postulates a distinction 
 between something radical in our impulses and something 
 1 See below, pp. 100, 103, etc.
 
 ioo THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 relatively superficial. It assumes that an impulse which 
 primarily expresses itself in one form may in interaction 
 with other impulse-feelings assume a different form, in 
 which it is fully satisfied. A leading instance would be 
 sexual feeling which, indiscriminate in its purely animal 
 phase, is, by a fusion of psychical influences, concentrated 
 in an impassioned devotion to one person wherein, as 
 long as the fusion endures, its satisfaction is complete. 
 It is only so far as some such transformation occurs that 
 harmony proper between originally conflicting impulses 
 becomes possible. We cannot a priori assume its possi- 
 bility, but that it does as a fact play a large part in life 
 is matter of experience, and recent psychology shows the 
 converse truth to be equally important. It shows that 
 the radical impulse which is apparently so to say, 
 officially suppressed, takes its revenge either in distur- 
 bance of the mental life or in some object or outlet 
 foreign to its original direction, and perhaps more 
 fatally, though more subtly, inconsistent with real harmony. 
 In general what we call the superficial impulse is the 
 particular application, or else the specific development, of 
 a generic want. To take a very trivial instance, it makes 
 very little difference whether I satisfy my appetite with 
 beef or with mutton, provided that either meat agrees 
 with me. But whether I am to satisfy my hunger at 
 all or go famished is a much more serious matter. Again, 
 an epicure may demand delicacies. This demand lies 
 deeper than the requirement of a particular luxury, but 
 in the normal man is itself a relatively superficial form 
 of the appetite for anything wholesome and well cooked. 
 So of the contented man Calverley sings : 
 
 " The grouse, the duck, the early pea 
 By such, if there, are freely taken. 
 If not, they munch with equal glee 
 Their bit of bacon." 
 
 Thus on a root impulse of hunger which cannot go un- 
 satisfied, or permanently under-satisfied, without serious 
 dislocation of our organization, there is an embroidery of
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD 101 
 
 more specific desires in a decreasing order of importance. 
 This conception may, I think, be generalized and we can 
 then recognize the foundations of inner harmony in the 
 satisfaction of the deepest impulses for which all the more 
 superficial forms are rightly sacrificed. A moral psychology 
 is required which should give us the hierarchy of impulses 
 and show us definitely, what at present we perhaps feel 
 rather than scientifically apprehend, which are our deepest 
 needs and what the conditions of their mutually consistent 
 satisfaction. 
 
 In any case harmony is possible so far as radical impulses 
 admit of mutual adjustment in their several objects or 
 expressions, and so far as such harmony is attainable it 
 forms a rational system in accordance with our previous 
 definition, and the conception of the good that accords 
 with it is a rational conception. For by the rational as 
 we have conceived it, we mean on the side of cognition an 
 order of thought which forms a coherent whole out of 
 all available elements of experience. It is to be compre- 
 hensive as well as consistent. All experience must be 
 admitted, and no mutually incompatible renderings of 
 experience can be tolerated. The work of building up 
 the rational order, however, proceeds piecemeal. Bit by 
 bit masses of experience are formed into connected groups 
 by interpretative conceptions, and these conceptions are 
 in turn brought into relation with one another. If they 
 conflict, rational thought seeks a modification which will 
 reduce them to consistency, but it aims at consistency, 
 not by ignoring any element of experience, but by 
 remodelling the interpretation of it, and it modifies its 
 interpretation only so far as the needs of consistency 
 throughout its interpretation of experience require. 
 Applying the same conception to conduct, and in par- 
 ticular to that practical attitude of approval or acceptance 
 which we speak of as the judgment of the good, we may 
 say that the rational good must similarty form a coherent 
 whole in which every element of apparent goodness is 
 duly weighed, that it is irrational to include in our 
 conception of the good, elements that conflict with each 
 
 ^TIA
 
 102 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 other, and equally irrational to exclude any element 
 except on the ground that it conflicts with some other, 
 and that when such conflict arises, the problem is to find 
 a synthesis in which each element is as far as possible 
 preserved. It is, of course, possible that a conflict might 
 be such as could only be ended by the complete extinction 
 of one impulse. But supposing that the end could equally 
 well be achieved by a partial modification not involving 
 suppression, this would be the more rational course. 
 We have, in fact, so far seen no reason for inhibiting and 
 suppressing one kind of impulse, except in the interest 
 of some other impulse or experience with which it con- 
 flicts, some disharmony which it causes, and to the extent 
 which this interest requires and no further. That is 
 to say, the primary judgment involved in our acceptance 
 of an experience holds good, except so far as it conflicts 
 with other elements of satisfaction of similar origin. 
 We see, so far, no reason in suppressing any impulse 
 merely for the sake of suppressing it. We see such reason 
 only in the modification rendered necessary by the 
 requirement of harmony throughout our practical attitude, 
 i.e. throughout our ends as a whole. The judgment of 
 the good expressed our acceptance of an experience and 
 that we found was the same thing as saying that it har- 
 monized with a feeling which is a part of our " organ- 
 ization." Now we find that such prima facie harmony 
 may lead to a deeper conflict and as rational beings we 
 seek to overcome this conflict, and seek a harmonious 
 satisfaction for our " organization " as a whole. At this 
 stage, then, we judge good that which fits in with this 
 more comprehensive organization. All that so harmonizes 
 is good, and nothing else. To reject anything that belongs 
 to this whole is to lose some element of the good. An 
 avoidable and therefore an irrational disharmony is 
 involved in the needless suppression of an impulse which, 
 if suitably modified, would in fact consist with those 
 which we cherish. 
 
 It is, then, by remodelling and transforming impulse 
 that the principle of harmony makes for many-sided
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD 103 
 
 development and fullness of life. Outwardly, indeed, 
 harmony appears most readily attainable through 
 repression. If a refractory feeling is simply kept under 
 it fails to disturb the orderly system of conduct. But 
 there is here a confusion between harmony and order. 
 The type of feeling which is merely repressed, and 
 subsists in the mind as a permanent impulse without an 
 outlet, is a source of permanent internal disharmony. 
 It may be that such repression is unavoidable, but if so 
 the dammed up current remains a permanent menace to 
 the order of life. The truer solution is always to find the 
 channel along which it may safely run, in other words, 
 to train the feeling and direct it towards objects which do 
 not clash with the other accepted purposes and rules of 
 life. In the provision of such an outlet there is net gain, 
 not only in the economy of internal friction which repression 
 involves, but in the fuller life which the utilization of 
 each fresh spring of impulse renders possible. The harmony 
 reached through development is always more complex 
 and is more difficult to attain than the order based on 
 repression, but it is intrinsically good, while repression is 
 at best a necessary evil. 1 
 
 1 The first announcement of the Principle of Harmony as the 
 basis alike of personal and social well-being is, I suppose, to 
 be found in Plato (Republic, bk. IV, p. 443, Tr. Da vies and 
 Vaughan) : "... the just man will not permit the several prin- 
 ciples within him to do any work but their own, nor allow the 
 distinct classes in his soul to interfere with each other, but will 
 really set his house in order, and having gained the mastery over 
 himself, will so regulate his character as to be on good terms with 
 himself, and to set those three principles in tune together, as if 
 they were verily three chords of a harmony, a higher and a lower 
 and a middle, and whatever may lie between these ; and after 
 he has bound all these together, and reduced the many elements 
 of his nature to a real unity, as a temperate and duly harmonized 
 man, he will then at length proceed to do whatever he may have 
 to do, whether it involve the acquisition of property or attention 
 to the wants of his body, whether it be a state affair or a business 
 transaction of his own ; in all which he will believe and profess 
 that the just and honourable course is that which preserves and 
 assists in creating the aforesaid habit of mind, and that the genuine 
 knowledge which presides over such conduct is wisdom ; while
 
 104 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 2. The process described may be succinctly formulated 
 as the development of personality. By development is 
 meant, for our purposes, progressive fulfilment. There 
 is fulfilment in the realization of any capacity, as in the 
 active exercise of an organ or the satisfaction of a desire. 
 There is development in the strengthening of the organ 
 by exercise or the reinforcement of an impulse by a 
 
 on the other hand, he will hold that an unjust action is one which 
 tends to destroy this habit, and that the mere opinion which pre- 
 sides over unjust conduct, is folly." This passage, however, must 
 be read with the earlier description of Temperance (p. 432a) as 
 a concord between the better and the worse elements as to which 
 of the two has the right to govern. From this it will be seen that, 
 in spite of the identity of name and partial agreement of idea, 
 there is a material difference between this conception and ours. 
 Plato's harmony is essentially a subjection of the Desires and 
 Appetites to reason the larger part of the soul, as he himself says, 
 to the smaller. Reason is a governing principle, and Desire has 
 nothing to do but obey. The position of the intermediate "spirited " 
 or emotional element is more honourable in that it is the natural 
 ally of Reason, but it is still subject to rational direction. The 
 view here taken is that harmony is not a subjection of any part 
 to any other, but a process of mutual development, and that reason 
 does not govern this process ab extra but is the principle of mutuality 
 within it. (It is right to remark, however, that the negative 
 function attributed to Desire is partly corrected by many other 
 passages in Plato.) 
 
 The present view of harmony is much closer to the Aristotelian 
 doctrine. The opdoe Xdyoe which defines the mean is incompletely 
 described in the Ethics, but the term is suggestive of a relation 
 between the means in all cases which would at least yield con- 
 sistency, which is the negative side of harmony. In his description 
 of the (77rov<)a7oe Aristotle describes in his own fashion of half- 
 conscious humour the life that is internally harmonious in our 
 sense : " . . . . the good man is of one mind with himself, and 
 desires the same things with all his soul, and wishes for himself 
 what both is and seems good. . . . Such a man also wishes to 
 live with himself ; for his own company is pleasant to him. The 
 memory of his past life is sweet, and for the future he has good 
 hopes ; and such hopes are pleasant. His mind, moreover, is 
 well stored with matter for contemplation : and he sympathizes 
 with himself in sorrow and in joy ; for at all seasons the same 
 things give him pain and pleasure, not this thing now, and then 
 another thing for he is, so to speak, not apt to change his mind " 
 (Ethics, ix. 4, Tr. Peters).
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD 105 
 
 satisfactory experience, which makes a still further and, 
 so to say, fuller fulfilment possible. Every development 
 is itself a fulfilment, but is also a step to a further ful- 
 filment, having as its goal a maximum or saturation point 
 of fulfilment beyond which no advance is possible, but only 
 the maintenance of that which has been achieved. By 
 Personality is meant that constitution of the self which 
 our account has postulated, that operative unity which, 
 by the continual interrelation of action and experience, 
 gives to each man's active life whatever cohesion and 
 whatever individuality it manifests. If we think of the 
 outer world as supplying the material of a possible life 
 to each of us, the impress given to this material is the 
 impress of our personality. This impress differs by shades 
 if not by deeper contrasts from case to case. In particular 
 the degree in which interrelation is effected varies very 
 greatly. If it should fail altogether we should deny that 
 personality existed and the attribute of personality is, 
 in fact, refused to men deemed incapable of appreciating 
 the permanent bearings of momentary impulse. If the 
 threads of relation are broken and then spun afresh we 
 call it a changed personality. If the interrelation is very 
 incomplete the personality strikes us as chaotic, irrational, 
 inconsistent in varying degrees. On the other hand, in 
 proportion as it is complete, the personality stands out as 
 a strongly-marked self-consistent individuality, imposing 
 its type upon experience and moulding its fortunes to its 
 own will. Clearly, then, while personality interrelates all 
 partial developments, it itself admits of development, 
 and it is in general on this central development that the 
 others depend, since without it they may clash and destroy 
 one another and life itself. 
 
 Now personality itself, as we know, may be incomplete 
 and onesided. It may starve itself of one meat and glut 
 upon another. It may unify its life by ruthless repression. 
 There is a " development " of the miser or the ascetic. 
 But these are not developments of the personality as a 
 whole, but of one part to the prejudice of others. 
 Development as a whole means development on all sides
 
 io6 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 that can in fact be reconciled, and though necessarily 
 subject to all the limitations of human finitude even 
 the restricted quantum of available energy necessitating 
 the sacrifice of one good thing for another the ideal is 
 clear and we can set our faces towards it if we cannot 
 reach it. The development of personality so conceived 
 will involve (i) a harmonization of impulse-feelings ; 
 (2) control of the conditions on which the success of every 
 impulse depends, that is to say, of the world of experience 
 generally, so far as it affects the individual. This con- 
 stitutes the harmonious fulfilment required by the rational 
 good, so far as this can be realized within the life of the 
 individual. If we mean by the development of person- 
 ality the establishment of the principle of harmony 
 within us, then that is broadly the psychological condition 
 of the rational good. If we mean by it the actual 
 process of the full and harmonious life, then it is the 
 good itself so far as it can be realized in one human 
 being. 
 
 3. So far, following out the psychological conditions of 
 synthesis, we have considered the question as though the 
 individual stood alone in the moral world. We have, 
 indeed, referred to an environment, but we have not 
 assumed that that environment contained any being 
 with claims upon the self. Yet without making any such 
 assumption we have been able to distinguish an apparent, 
 or, as we might say, subjective good from a permanent 
 real or objective good, to identify the one with the 
 pleasurable feeling based on a single susceptibility of the 
 self, and the other with the harmony in which the whole 
 soul is expressed. We have seen that this harmony of 
 judgment or feeling has as its aim or, to put it otherwise, 
 its objective expression, the harmony of experience and 
 action as far as the control of the personality can be 
 extended. We have, in short, been able to conceive the 
 elements of a rational ethics within the limits of a single 
 personality. 
 
 But, of course, this way of regarding the matter is a 
 mere fiction, introduced for convenience, and as has been
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD 107 
 
 said above, we are not to suppose that the ethics of the 
 self are either logically or chronologically built up first 
 and then the ethics of altruism added on. Prominent 
 among the stimuli of the environment upon each indivi- 
 dual are phases of the behaviour of other people, and 
 prominent among the susceptibilities, the conations and 
 the feelings of each are from the first those which have 
 relation to others. Indeed there is not the slightest 
 doubt that this altruistic reference begins psychologically 
 long before the distinction of self and others is clearly 
 made in consciousness. We can trace it in the organic 
 world in instincts that arise at a level far below that in 
 which distinctness of personality is formed. The trans- 
 personal reference, then, is a constitutive element in the 
 normal personality. Moreover, as has also been said, 
 these transpersonal references at least, so far as they 
 make for co-operation and mutual understanding may 
 be collectively regarded as partial expressions and emo- 
 tional renderings of the truth which is in ethics the most 
 essential part of the rational principle itself. This is 
 the truth that each personality is itself but a part of a 
 whole, and its harmony an element in a wider harmony. 
 Just as it is irrational to follow a single impulse by itself 
 without considering its relation to other impulses, so at 
 a higher remove the irrational in morality is the practice 
 of taking the self out of connexion with other selves, 
 or a group out of relation with a wider group as the whole 
 instead of as the part. We are thus brought from the 
 psychological to the social synthesis, and to trace its 
 operation we may start from the individual personality 
 and follow the same method as before. What falls in 
 with our approval is prima facie good, and we remodel 
 our first judgment only so far as the needs of harmony 
 require. Hence the " good " of each personality the 
 development in which a mass of susceptibilities egoistic 
 and altruistic were harmonized, must be remodelled so 
 far but only so far as is required by the necessity for 
 harmony with the effort and aim of others. The end 
 must now be the harmonious development, not of the
 
 io8 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 individual personality as such, but of all that group with 
 which the individual can enter into organic relation 
 ideally of nothing less than collective humanity. 
 
 We might express this result by saying that we apply 
 to conduct the rational principle that similars must be 
 treated similarly and that, as a certain development is 
 good for me, so a similar development is good for others 
 who are similar to me. But this mode of expression, 
 as has been shown above, suggests, if it does not actually 
 involve, more than one element of fallacy. To begin with, 
 it treats the conception of goodness as formed for self 
 on one ground and transferred to others by a piece of 
 intellectual ratiocination. The truth is that the process 
 is the same throughout and is essentially conative or 
 practical rather than intellectual. The principle of the 
 practical reason is that the action of each moment is to 
 be fitted into the entire scheme of conduct. This is an 
 abstract or intellectualist expression for the effort towards 
 harmony, which is common to the whole of the moral 
 consciousness, which pieces the personality together as well 
 as binding man with man. This effort is never merely 
 " cognitive," i.e. it is never confined to the recognition 
 of something that is already there. It is the element 
 operative always in the shaping of conduct and character. 
 It does not begin with the building of the personality 
 and then proceed to the building of society, for in the 
 shaping of the personality the transpersonal reference is 
 abundantly present. Nor, lastly, is it quite true to 
 conceive my good as a fixed datum from which to infer 
 that of other people. For no person's good is definitely 
 fixed till the whole is considered. The datum at any 
 stage is the prima facie good, and the conclusion at the 
 full development of that stage is the harmony wherein 
 the prima facie good is in greater or less degree modified. 
 Self-development, as such, does not, in short, remain 
 part of the social ideal. Rather all personal development 
 is good as long as it is capable of harmony, and given 
 harmony, the wider the sphere of development, the greater 
 the good attained.
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD 109 
 
 Nevertheless there is a sense in which social development 
 may be understood as the synthesis of the development 
 of individuals. So far as the achievement of each man is 
 truly social, it fits in with and advances the achievement 
 of others, and the " structure " so built up is a collective 
 work, " a general deed of man," which grows from 
 generation to generation. The conditions of this growth, 
 indeed, differ markedly in the case of different social 
 products. In the matter of organized knowledge it is 
 comparatively easy for the more gifted individual to 
 enter into the heritage of generous social effort. The 
 young mathematician can soon learn much that Newton 
 never knew. Thus, placed abreast of the best thought 
 of the age, it is relatively easy to make an advance which 
 will definitely carry knowledge a little further. The 
 body of definite knowledge eminently a social product 
 develops steadily by a kind of mechanical accretion. 
 The case is much the same with the material capital of 
 society, its roads and railways, its buildings and labora- 
 tories, and with the immaterial tradition of industrial 
 and artistic skill. Such developments may be steady and 
 continuous, and are rarely arrested or lost except through 
 some social cataclysm proceeding from other causes. On 
 the side of conduct, of ethical ideas and practice and of 
 established social relations, the matter is somewhat more 
 complex. The established tradition is indeed always of 
 inestimable value, but it is hardly to be developed and 
 improved with the same certainty. In ethics and in 
 religion it is not possible to communicate the whole 
 meaning of truth by teaching. Each man has to enter 
 into it anew for himself. The social milieu is much, but 
 it is not everything. Ideas of life have to be reincarnated 
 in every fresh living experience, and as each individual 
 is exposed to his own dangers and temptations, so the 
 changing circumstances of a people provide new oppor- 
 tunities, open out fresh dangers, which act as social 
 temptations and often lower the standard or weaken the 
 principle which an earlier generation had fought hard to 
 set up. On the ethical side, therefore, progress is less
 
 no THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 steady. Yet the whole mass of social institutions, of 
 philosophical, ethical and religious conceptions as well 
 as the heritage of the imaginative world, of literature and 
 art, must of course rank among social developments and 
 owe their rise and progress to the action of mind on mind 
 a million times repeated. The harmony that governs 
 them, that determines their value and ultimately con- 
 ditions their growth is centred, not in the individual 
 personality, but in that which we call metaphorically the 
 social mind, an expression for the resultant directive 
 force of the complex interaction of innumerable individuals 
 and of successive generations. The supreme develop- 
 ment that which embraces all that is good in all sub- 
 ordinate developments is that which, bringing this central 
 directive force from infancy to maturity, welds all partial 
 fulfilments into a coherent scheme and moves to the 
 harmony of experience and feeling as a whole. 
 
 Now the ordinary purposes and impulses of men lead 
 them along the line of one subordinate development or 
 another, but it is only the authority of the moral law that 
 keeps these various ends from utter divergence, and it is 
 only a completely rationalized ethics that could so direct 
 them as to establish real harmony among them. The 
 problems of conduct arise because the different lines of 
 human development are not naturally harmonious, and 
 this is why the good as we know it does not appear to 
 consist in development alone, but involves also much 
 repression so much that the negative commandments 
 often occupy the most prominent place. But here again 
 the truer view is that repression only exists for the sake 
 of fuller development, and we may conceive this develop- 
 ment as the working out in a great variety of forms, and 
 under much diversity of conditions, of a unitary principle. 
 
 In tracing the emergence of order in the consciousness 
 of the individual we were led to conceive of the personality 
 as a comprehensive, self-consistent impulse, organizing 
 the subordinate impulses of the self and the world of 
 experience with which it comes into contact, into a 
 harmony. Now extending our view to the whole world
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD in 
 
 of living activity and feeling we have to conceive of a 
 wider impulse similarly related to each separate person- 
 ality, and thus tending to an organicity of human life 
 and experience as a whole. The building up of isolated 
 impulses into the Self or Person, and the union of separate 
 individuals in a social bond may be regarded as the two 
 great movements of synthesis, which between them bridge 
 the whole gulf between the isolated impulse and the 
 complete harmony of activity and feeling. It is, we have 
 contended, a serious error to suppose that these two forms 
 of synthesis are separate in their operation, for it is pre- 
 cisely the same living impulse towards organization and 
 harmony that runs through both. But they are based on 
 specific differences of relation within the unity, and 
 may be briefly designated the principle of Personality and 
 the principle of Love. The shaping of impulse under the 
 developing influence of these principles, is, to put the 
 matter in the most general terms, the condition of 
 Harmony. 1 
 
 4. In this account Development figures as a means, and 
 Harmony as the real end, and this is in a sense the true 
 relation. But there is another side to the matter, 
 (a) In any stage short of complete maturity harmony is 
 as much a cause as an effect of Development. We have 
 seen the relation at its simplest in the development of a 
 faculty or susceptibility where feeling is in harmony with 
 impulse. The satisfaction in each experience confirms 
 
 We set out to enquire into the two departments of Harmony, 
 that of feelings inter se, and that of feeling in general. Now we 
 have found two principles of development. The temptation to 
 pair them off, one principle for each department, is obvious, but 
 must be resisted. We naturally incline to make Love the basis 
 of harmony in feeling, and to see in this principle, taken separately, 
 the ground of that submissive acceptance of the external order 
 which becomes religious Quietism. Then again we could see 
 pushing, self-assertive, practical Personality shouldering the task, 
 which Love in its gentleness declines, of subduing refractory 
 elements in human or external nature. But in fact the " conquest " 
 of nature is more a collective than a personal achievement, while 
 conversely, some unification of impulse-feeling has been shown 
 to be required by Personality.
 
 H2 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 the impulse and carries it through to the end. It also 
 deepens the hold of that type of impulse and so tends to 
 carry it to its maximum point of strength. It is only 
 when this maximum is reached that growth ceases. 
 Similarly, so far as the different powers or susceptibilities 
 of a man form a harmonious whole, it follows from the 
 bare conception of such a whole that they tend to strengthen 
 one another. If it is true, as the Greeks maintained, that 
 virtue is one, it is because each virtue which, so far as 
 it is separable, may be regarded as a development of one 
 side of human nature, is favourable to the corresponding 
 growth of other virtues. Courage and Temperance, as a 
 Greek would have said, are conditions of justice, for in 
 one sort of difficulty it needs a high spirit and contempt 
 of danger, in another it needs moderation of passions and 
 self-control to fulfil the demand of duty to our neighbour 
 or to the community. In the same way the good citizen 
 is, so to say, essentially a co-operative unit. He contri- 
 butes something to the common life of society, which 
 upon the whole tends to raise the standard of the common 
 life and to assist in the further development of good 
 citizenship. In each case it is equally true that what is 
 bad tends to propagate corruption, but if the corruption 
 goes far enough, death ensues, death of the will in the 
 individual or of the social structure in the case of the 
 community, and the only growth is of the cancerous type 
 that must finally destroy the tissue in which it lives. 
 Lastly, any purpose recognized as good is necessarily 
 assisted and carried further by the will which so recognizes 
 it, and if different purposes ultimately find a harmony 
 they must similarly tend to mutual assistance and a 
 common growth. The limit in every case is fullness of 
 development. Wherever it is reached, wherever, for 
 example, a structure has reached the full growth which 
 the conditions of its existence admit, harmony has its 
 effect, not in the further development, but in the main- 
 tenance of that structure at the point of fullest efficiency. 
 But where the limits of growth are undefined, harmony 
 is manifested in development, and wherever there is
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD 113 
 
 repression there is pro tanto disharmony. Now the scope 
 of the mind as an organizing principle in the world has 
 no limits known to us. We may conceive a heaven in 
 which mind, having attained its full stature, would find 
 its good in the fruition of the perfect harmony finally 
 achieved in an " energy of realization without process of 
 change." But, short of this heaven, Harmony and 
 Development continue to support and advance one another. 
 
 (b) Of the two it is Harmony, we have granted, which 
 is the ultimate end. But if we regard Development as 
 a means, it is partly because it is a process, incomplete 
 and pointing beyond itself. We defined it as a progressive 
 fulfilment. Now conversely, we can enlarge the conception 
 of fulfilment to cover not only its ideal completeness, 
 but any stage on the way. Fulfilment, then, becomes 
 another name for Development in its static aspect 
 not as something in process, but as something which has 
 attained a certain level. Now Fulfilment so regarded has 
 a higher status in the good than that of a mere means. 
 It is the resume of all that mass of living experience which 
 has been definitely brought into harmony with feeling. 
 
 Harmony of feeling and experience appears, to begin 
 with, in the fulfilment of Conation. In the case of clear 
 purpose this means the attainment of the end with which 
 the purpose sets out. In the case of the lower grades of 
 conation it means the removal of the discomfort or lack 
 from which the conation starts. In the more passive 
 experiences in which conation plays a secondary part, 
 there is, where we find harmony, a touching into life of 
 emotional susceptibility, an active realization of what was 
 a dormant capacity. Here, too, then, something that is 
 at first a mere potentiality is completed. A capacity of 
 reaction finds the object appropriate to it and issues in 
 activity. This also we may call fulfilment. Thus the 
 good consists in the fulfilment of vital capacity, but the 
 rational good cannot consist in the fulfilment of any and 
 every sort of capacity, since one fulfilment may destroy 
 another. It can consist only in such fulfilments as are 
 in mutual consistency. These, when life is considered as 
 
 8
 
 ii4 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 a whole, will also yield the greatest sum of fulfilment. 1 
 In fact, so far as our vital capacities attain or approach 
 realization as a whole, it can only be through a scheme 
 which is internally consistent in its practical operation. 
 The rational good then, as the mode of life sustained by 
 a harmony of feeling, is a harmonious fulfilment of vital 
 capacity, or the fulfilment of vital capacity as a whole. 
 Feeling in harmony with its object is what we call Pleasure. 
 The body of feeling in harmony with itself and the body 
 of its objects is what we call happiness. Viewed as 
 feeling, then, the Rational Good is happiness, viewed as 
 the object of this feeling it is the fulfilment of vital capacity 
 as a consistent whole.* Viewed in both aspects together 
 it is happiness found in such fulfilment. It is an error 
 to regard either the feeling as a mere means to the ful- 
 filment or the fulfilment as a mere means to the feeling. 
 The fulfilment is the object of the feeling, not in the 
 sense of its aim, but in the sense of that in relation to 
 which the feeling subsists. Finally, the sense of harmony 
 which is pleasure and happiness does not come into being 
 first with complete fulfilment, neither does it perish with 
 fulfilment, as some think, but is active all along the line 
 
 1 For if anything be added it must by hypothesis cancel some- 
 thing that has been included. That something has been included 
 either (i) because it harmonized with the rest of the system while 
 the proposed addition conflicted. In that case to make the addition 
 would not only cancel one element but the system generally. Or 
 (2) because it was the more strongly felt, i.e. rested on a larger 
 energy of impulse or realized a richer feeling. In that case it is 
 in itself the fuller realization of capacity. 
 
 * It may be said that, in the fulfilment of purpose, the point 
 is not the realization of any capacity but the attainment of an 
 objective end. In fact neither in knowledge nor in action can 
 the conscious mind dispense with an object, but the reason why 
 we describe the object in terms of mind rather than the impulse 
 or will in terms of the object is this. The thing to be achieved 
 is that in which impulses of our own, modified by reflections of 
 our own, take precise form and direction, and if it is good and 
 fruitful the thing achieved meets a need of our own, and so returns 
 into and helps to further the system of impulses and needs, of 
 each of which in turn the same things may be said.
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD 115 
 
 of conation as far as it is working with success. There 
 is pleasure in pursuit, but if the prize is solid, that is in 
 harmony with the permanent scheme of vital fulfilment, 
 as in the fruition of a genuine love, there is equal pleasure 
 in attainment and possession. 
 
 It may be asked whether we ought not to regard 
 practical rationality still more broadly as an impulse to 
 harmony in reality as a whole, not merely in the world of 
 feeling. Harmony as the mutual support of parts seems 
 in itself to have a wider application, to be realized, in 
 fact, in every structure, even a purely material structure, 
 which, as a whole, maintains itself. Thus the keystone 
 of an arch keeps in place the bricks which keep it in 
 place. The several parts of the arch maintain one another. 
 On the other hand, there seems to be nothing " good " 
 or " bad " about an arch, except the purely external, 
 human, purpose which it serves. A somewhat more 
 difficult case is an object of beauty. Here, again, 1 there 
 is the relation of harmony, different parts necessitating 
 one another, and it would not be so easy to say offhand 
 that the object as a whole has no value in itself. The 
 mutilation of Rheims Cathedral seemed something terrible, 
 apart from any injury to feeling or loss to the artistic 
 enjoyment of human beings. On reflection, however, 
 I believe that we find an element of illusion in a sentiment 
 of this kind. A visible world which there is no one to 
 see is not, in my opinion, as it is in that of many, an 
 expression without a meaning, because I do not believe 
 that surfaces and colours, light and shade, depend for 
 their existence upon the observer. Whether a beautiful 
 world which there is no one to appreciate has a meaning 
 is a point on which, for myself, I am more doubtful, 
 i.e. I cannot feel sure that beauty is a character of things 
 independent of their relation to a contemplating mind. 
 
 1 That is to say, in developed art. The beautiful as such is in 
 harmony with feeling, but the question here is of a harmony within 
 the beautiful object over and above harmony with feeling. Some 
 of the difficulties in defining the elements of beauty as consisting 
 in a harmony in this sense have been hinted at above (chap, iv, 
 p. 69 note). I cannot examine them here
 
 n6 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 But a world in which beauty has value or is good, although 
 there is none to value it or find the good in it, does seem 
 to me to contain a contradiction. That is to say, I believe 
 value and goodness to be conditioned by the life of mind. 
 This, I think, is the consequence of our original definition. 
 We found " good " to mean not harmony in general, but 
 harmony with some disposition of mind, and developing 
 this we found rational good to reside in a harmony carried 
 consistently through the world of mind and its experience, 
 a harmony of mind with itself and with its object. It 
 is not, then, harmony as such, but harmony in and with 
 Mind that is good. 
 
 Even this formula, however, seems to carry us a step 
 beyond our original definition. If a beautiful object has 
 no value apart from mind, is there not a sense in which 
 it has an intrinsic value for mind ? It is not valued as 
 a means, but as a joy of itself. Does its goodness, then, 
 reside only in the activity of creation or contemplation ? 
 This is surely as one-sided an abstraction as the goodness 
 of the object apart from the mind. Goodness we found 
 originally was in the harmony of feeling and object, and 
 we granted the validity of the term for each element in 
 this relation. The object, then, which of itself and not 
 as a mere means to something else, yields satisfaction, 
 must be deemed good, and we must extend our definition 
 of the rational good to include along with the fulfilment 
 of vital capacity the system of objects which such fulfil- 
 ment involves, the system, we may phrase it, in which the 
 mind finds itself at home. This system will include 
 material objects, all that is beautiful for instance and all 
 manifestations of structural perfection and vast ordered 
 energy. But there will always be this distinction between 
 material things and animate beings, that the " goodness " 
 of a material thing involves its relation to a mind. It is 
 good in the sense that it is an indispensable element in 
 a whole that is good (as contrasted with a mere instrument 
 which may be indifterently replaced with another). The 
 mind, on the other hand, that enjoys any harmony is 
 (to that extent) a good of itself, requiring no further
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD 117 
 
 condition to complete it. But this harmony may require 
 material objects not merely a? instruments but as part 
 of its constitution. To recognize this we should, I think, 
 define the good as Happiness in the fulfilment of vital 
 capacity in a world adapted to Mind. 
 
 6. In this definition Happiness means Happiness of all 
 beings capable thereof ; fulfilment of vital capacity means 
 fulfilment in all living beings so far as it can attain har- 
 monious expression. It is this universal harmony of 
 feeling and vital activity which is the good, and the end 
 which each individual is required to serve, not his own 
 happiness or the fulfilment of his own powers. How the 
 good of the individual is related to this comprehensive 
 end has been indicated in the preceding sections. In 
 general confirmation of that analysis it may be added here 
 that of empirical truths about happiness, few are more 
 certain than this that the individual must find happiness 
 in objects beyond himself. Neither his own happiness 
 nor the fulfilment of his own personality is an adequate 
 statement of an end which will satisfy permanently a 
 finite individual. Shut up in the self he is stifled and, 
 whether it be called happiness or self-development, there 
 is the same stuffiness in the confined atmosphere. The 
 self must have some other person to care for, even, if it 
 can get nothing better, some material object to pursue. 
 It must fasten itself to the larger world by some attachment 
 that gives a man a reason for continued existence, even 
 if it be nothing more thrilling than that 
 
 " Somewhat completer, he may say, 
 My list of Coleoptera." 
 
 No one is wholly unhappy who finds some external interest 
 to engage him, but neither is he very happy if his interests 
 are such as to leave large tracts of his natural capacity 
 unfulfilled. This fulfilment is material to the happiness 
 of the individual, but the first condition of any fulfilment 
 is that he should look beyond himself. 
 
 Where, then, is he to look 1 According to our definition 
 he is to look to anything great or small, personal or
 
 n8 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 impersonal, that contributes to the fullness of life upon 
 the whole. Thus, whether he is bringing up his child 
 or serving the State, or stubbing Thornaby waste, he is 
 doing his part in a harmonious movement. But, it may 
 be asked, why should the fulfilment of another personality 
 (e.g. in the education of the child) be an end of true value 
 when self-fulfilment is not such an end ? The answer 
 may be put in various ways, of which perhaps the simplest 
 is that there is nothing complete without love. Though 
 one person cannot be happy in himself, two people can 
 be very happy in one another and as objects to one another 
 so happy that they may think that they need no one 
 and no thing else. This, however, is a fallacy of exaggera- 
 tion which leads to the e'goisme d deux. The pair need 
 a common object that takes them beyond each other, 
 and if the child seems to complete this trinity it is because 
 the promise of its life points them on and on into a vista 
 which has no closed end. 1 Even a great community 
 that cultivates its own life in isolation and indifference 
 to the rest of mankind is open to the charge of collective 
 egoism and the danger of ultimate sterility. 
 
 Pursuing this line of thought we are forced to ask 
 whether humanity itself is not subject to the same law. 
 Can it make its own fulfilment its goal, even if we include 
 with this the making of the world into a home of order 
 and beauty ? Would not the whole race be involved 
 in an egoism and ultimate sterility thus shut up within 
 itself, and must it not find something entirely outside 
 itself to serve ? If Humanity is only one incarnation of 
 Mind this would be in our definition true. It has not 
 
 1 Compare Ruskin's postulate of some " escape " into the Beyond 
 as an element of the highest aesthetic effect in painting. Observe 
 too that, in his teaching, this condition has to be reconciled with 
 the still more essential requirement of Repose. This reconciliation 
 of apparent opposites seems to be the problem both of life and 
 of art. We demand objects that satisfy, and yet it seems to be 
 a condition that they should point beyond themselves and thus 
 not wholly satisfy a paradox which i3 resolved if we have the 
 grounded confidence that what is wholly good breeds more good 
 and more in unending sequence. Here there is at least a hint 
 of assuagement for the human lot of " infinite passion and the 
 pain of finite hearts that yearn."
 
 THE REALIZED GOOD 119 
 
 merely to care for the lower forms of life but to enter into 
 relation with whatever beings have mind. But if we take 
 Humanity as the head of the only living creation that 
 we know, or if for Humanity we simply substitute Mind, 
 can we assign for it any object but the self- fulfilment of 
 our definition ? We can think of the fulfilment of Mind 
 as having value, we can think of some things other than 
 minds as having a value conditioned by mind a value 
 for mind. Can we think of anything else that has value, 
 and which could, accordingly, be an object for Mind to 
 serve ? If not we must keep to our definition, but can 
 we then avoid the charge of a kind of egoism and ultimate 
 sterility which has pursued us from the individual onwards ? 
 The reply, I think, is this. We saw that egoism was trans- 
 formed by love when only one other person came within 
 the orbit of interest. But we saw a narrow finitude and 
 an ugly indifference to the fate of others involved in the 
 exclusiveness of personal affection. These characteristics 
 fade gradually away as the circle is enlarged. In par- 
 ticular in the wider life of a great community nothing 
 comes to an end. The effects of action, good or bad, do 
 not cease. The possibilities of development are without 
 assignable limit. Yet still, if there is indifference to a 
 wider world there is something lacking. Love clearly is 
 unfulfilled, and there is a limit to the expansiveness of 
 faculty and achievement where there is no desire to share 
 the fruits with all who can enjoy them. These limits 
 disappear only when we come to the whole world of mind, 
 aware of itself as a unity bound together by love and 
 reason. Nothing imagined as of possible value, nothing 
 capable of happiness or misery is shut out. The distinction 
 of self and other has vanished, because outside this " self " 
 there is no other. The ego must find an object because 
 it needs love, and it needs something to connect it with 
 the world of mind. But the world of mind is based on 
 love within, and has nothing without to connect itself 
 with. Thus its end is the achievement and maintenance 
 of a harmony within, while to the individual it is an object 
 in which he may certainly share but which stretches far 
 and wide beyond his own personality.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 APPLICATIONS 
 
 i. THE rational principle is not only an ideal but a 
 working impulse in man and society. So far, it resembles 
 the spiritual principle of Idealism. But it is of the first 
 importance to make clear that it is an impulse working 
 under cramping limitations. Idealist writers explain 
 imperfections by the incomplete development of their 
 principle. In truth, this is merely a negative condition. 
 The irrational and immoral elements in life, its cruelties 
 and injustices and Pharisaisms, have springs of which 
 Reason, developed or undeveloped, is innocent. They go 
 back to the man who fights for his own hand, the impulse 
 that pursues its regardless course, the limiting physical 
 conditions that bind man to the immediate, a menacing 
 environment with which reason germinating slowly has 
 to grapple as best she may. Far from dominating the 
 actual moral code, reason, as an explicit conception, is 
 the latest comer on the field. The working code of morals 
 grows up, as has been shown, out of the countless inter- 
 actions of man with man, the feelings which they excite, 
 the kind of life which they make possible or impossible. 
 Consider, for instance, the genesis of public justice. Follow- 
 ing an impulse of resentment a man seeks to avenge an 
 injury. He kills his man, and in turn arouses the wrath 
 of the victim's son. The son appeals to uncle and cousin, 
 gets help, and seeks to retaliate. Through such retaliation 
 the manslayer and his kindred, it may be, learn a lesson 
 in moderation. Or, perhaps, a woman connected by blood 
 with one party and by marriage with the other intervenes
 
 APPLICATIONS 
 
 and makes peace. A settlement is achieved and becomes 
 a precedent, and there emerges a rule regulating the 
 occasions and the degree of vengeance, or possibly 
 prescribing the conditions and nature of compensation 
 for injuries. Where no such lessons are learnt, where a 
 tribe proves itself incapable of being taught, it may 
 disappear through internal anarchy, or become a prey to 
 a more disciplined neighbour. The actual conditions of 
 life are there and are sternly operative, whether men have 
 reason enough to apprehend them or no. They must, 
 on the whole, operate selectively, giving to those whose 
 emotions are more nearly attuned to the actual require- 
 ments of their life-conditions, or who are best able to 
 modify their passions and direct their actions as the 
 conditions require, an advantage and an eventual pre- 
 ponderance over others. The rational mode of feeling, 
 the emotion which in kind and degree responds to what is 
 really good in human life, owes its original growth, not 
 to the clear apprehension of the function which it 
 performs, but to the bare fact that in performing that 
 function it helps to keep society together, and to develop 
 and expand its life. Just as organs and impulses which 
 serve the individual tend to grow because on the whole 
 those who possess them thrive and are fruitful and 
 multiply, so, at a higher remove, modes of feeling, and 
 finally ideas and thoughts which serve society have this 
 indirect advantage over others, that in so far as they 
 predominate the society which they inspire is more likely 
 to prosper and expand or impose its type upon its neigh- 
 bours. There are filaments of Reason, as was said at 
 the outset, but filaments are not the matured structure. 
 They grow because they do, in fact, correspond to funda- 
 mental conditions of life, not because the life which they 
 create is clearly conceived. Reason comes by her own, 
 not because men willingly and consciously accept her, 
 but because unreason carried far enough produces miseries 
 and disasters. Sufficiently grave departures, whether to 
 the right hand or to the left, either produce reactions or 
 lead to social dissolution. Against dissolute practice,
 
 122 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 society will perhaps erect the barrier of a stringent theory, 
 and save itself in turn from the consequences of the theory 
 by a network of tacit understandings forming a secondary 
 and more genuine code of conduct beside or behind that 
 which men outwardly profess. The price of luxury is 
 disorder, the price of undue strictness is insincerity, and 
 both prices will be paid until men seek to found conduct 
 on the dispassionate consideration of what is permanently 
 in accord with the requirements of human nature under 
 the conditions of social life. 
 
 In the actual formation of the working code the whole 
 range of human emotions, good, bad and indifferent, 
 play their part. Not only all that makes us citizens, 
 but all that makes us men and all that makes us animals 
 has its share. Take the case of the complex customs 
 and ideas that in every society cluster round the relations 
 of the sexes. The function of these customs is to maintain 
 the family life at its best, and to serve the development 
 of affections and emotions that are most vital to the 
 happiness of men and women. But what part has any 
 clear conception of such a function played in the actual 
 determination of custom, or law, or sexual morality ? 
 The actual family morals, that is to say the whole assem- 
 blage of law, custom and social feeling regulating the 
 relations of the sexes and the procreation and rearing of 
 children in any society, is a complex whole derivable 
 from a medley of forces, psychological and social, which 
 it would be exceedingly difficult to analyse in full and 
 which, moreover, interact with one another in ways which 
 are never quite the same in any two cases. There is, 
 first, the mass of feeling that clusters round the sex 
 relationship. There is conjugal and family affection, 
 and running across it the yellow streak of mere animal 
 jealousy. Perhaps underlying jealousy itself and almost 
 certainly contributing to the respect for virginity and 
 disgust at the unchaste, is the impulse, half physical in 
 origin, to isolation, the readily awakened feeling of repug- 
 nance to contact, the antithesis to the sexual passion. 
 On such primitive material of emotional tendency operate
 
 APPLICATIONS 123 
 
 now the self-assertion of the male, leading him to appro- 
 priate whom he can and guard his own, now the fear of 
 ridicule and contempt if he fails to hold his claim, now 
 a more ethical sense of compunction, of justice and of 
 responsibility. Elements of emotion such as these, com- 
 plex as they are, are only a few among the factors that 
 go to form the morals of the family. Side by side with 
 them and interacting with them in subtle ways, we must 
 place the social relations of the family, the form of 
 property, the prevailing state of industry, and the religious 
 ideas acknowledged in the society. Where kinship, for 
 example, is the basis of mutual protection, the family 
 will tend to hold together and build up large aggregates 
 of kinsfolk and neighbours, prepared to stand solidly 
 together in the blood feud. The joint possession of flocks 
 and herds, or possibly of agricultural land, may find 
 for each member the means of sustenance and of useful 
 occupation under the patriarchal guidance of the oldest 
 male of the kin, and the common worship of the ancestor 
 and the performance of the due funeral rites to the dead 
 may strengthen the bond and deepen the sense of per- 
 manent family unity by all the sanctity of religion. At 
 another stage of development all these forces may have 
 shifted. The function of protection may have been 
 assumed by the King or the State, industry may no longer 
 be confined to pastoral or agricultural pursuits, the worship 
 of ancestors may be condemned by religion, and offerings 
 to the dead have lost their significance. The family has 
 become perhaps a mobile and far smaller unit. It is 
 reduced to parents and their children, and it may be that 
 children scarcely remain under the parental roof till they 
 are grown up, while comparative facility of divorce impairs 
 the stability of the conjugal relation itself. It is well in 
 such a case, where the functions of the family have largely 
 changed, if there is sufficiently clear understanding of 
 its permanent function and value to supply the place of 
 a religious code dating from an earlier sociological stratum. 
 It is not, however, our business here to discuss the 
 ethics of family life, but merely to suggest by the very
 
 124 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 slightest analysis of one example the contrast between 
 the rational determination of a custom by the function 
 which it serves, and the actual conditions of its growth, 
 as dependent on a confused mass of feelings and ideas 
 played upon by social forces and religious doctrines, and 
 shaped by traditions which may or may not have outlived 
 their usefulness. 
 
 What has been said of the family applies with equal 
 force to any part of the social structure and even to 
 current morality as a system of judgments. Moralists 
 have concentrated their interest on one fundamental 
 question about moral psychology. Has it at its core 
 conscience or self-love, reason or passion, altruism or 
 egoism ? It is true that any ethical enquiry would start 
 from this question and take us back to it again, but there 
 is a circuit embracing questions more psychological than 
 philosophical which are of extreme interest in themselves 
 and of great importance when we begin to apply philo- 
 sophical conceptions to working life. Having made our 
 view of the core, it is hoped, sufficiently plain we may well 
 consider the husks which are to be stripped off. Now, 
 if we look at the actual impulses underlying the moral 
 judgments that men commonly pronounce and the 
 behaviour in which these issue, we have to recognize in 
 them a good deal that is neither very rational nor even 
 social. In the very essence of moral censorship there is 
 an anti-social element, a pursuit of the sinner, an exaltation 
 of self, something at times of the hunting instinct, some- 
 thing of " herd " psychology. The contemplation of 
 exalted virtue may give pleasure, but it is to be feared 
 that it is a less exciting pleasure and one less consciously 
 felt than that which the audacious or even the despicable 
 criminal daily affords to the readers of countless newspapers. 
 " What's one man's news," said Mr. Dooley, " is another 
 man's misfortunes," and in particular he might have 
 added his moral misadventures. The reasons for this 
 interest are complex. On the one hand there is a kind 
 of self-exaltation in " damning sins we have no mind to." 
 Secretly we are rather depressed by the heroic and the
 
 APPLICATIONS 125 
 
 saint-like because it makes our own life seem petty and 
 faintly makes a claim on us which our inertia resists. 
 The gentleman of easy virtue restores our credit with 
 ourselves. Anyway we are better than he is and will 
 prove it by the stones we cast at him. But it is a mistake 
 to suppose that we do not also damn the " sins we are 
 inclined to." On the contrary we must damn them to 
 preserve ourselves from them, to say nothing of our credit 
 with the rest of the world. The " repressed " criminal 
 impulses express themselves freely in the discussion and 
 even in the reprobation of crime. In particular, the 
 omnipresent " repressions " of sex take their revenge in 
 an extremely vigilant censorship of other people. In 
 this widespread popular diversion with all its moods of 
 censure from the sniggering to the thunderous, it is the 
 repressed passion itself that is active, rejoicing in the license 
 given it for once by the moral consciousness. The virtuous 
 will not sin, but they will dissect the sin of others with 
 an insight and particularity made possible only by the 
 potential sin in themselves. In brief, though the moral 
 consciousness has a core of reason, it is deeply embedded 
 in husks growing out of all mutual antagonisms of man 
 and out of repressed impulses twisted into strange shapes. 
 Religious and ethical teachers have seen this part of the 
 truth with great perspicacity. They have been perfectly 
 aware that the function of censorship and punishment is 
 not to satisfy the judge or critic, but to protect society 
 and convert the offender. There is little to add to the 
 Platonic maxim that if justice is good it cannot be its office 
 to inflict real evil. The Christian teaching on this point is 
 perfectly plain. Yet it is still uphill work to plead for 
 the treatment of wrong-doing in the spirit of the doctor 
 rather than the executioner, still more to convince the 
 world that restored self-respect and renewed hope are better 
 medicines than continued self-abasement, pain and fear. 1 
 
 1 The above analysis is the explanation of the moral disharmonies 
 referred to above (chap, iv, p. 73). It does not alter the fact that 
 disapproval is essentially displeasurable, but shows that the basis 
 of approval and disapproval in the working moral code is not 
 wholly rational.
 
 126 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 2. The moral consciousness, as we know it, is a complex 
 result of many imperfectly congruous elements. From 
 the sifting process of criticism there emerges the rational 
 order, at once the simplest and the most comprehensive 
 of all schemes of life. Considered as a whole, it is a system 
 of vast complexity, embracing the infinite range of human 
 activity and every possibility of human development. 
 No mind could be complex enough, or subtle enough, to 
 trace out all its possibilities of application. At the same 
 time, the direct relations of man to man, which, endlessly 
 repeated and interwoven, build up the life of the whole, 
 require for their just appreciation mere simplicity, 
 singleness of aim and the sympathetic understanding of 
 things that flows from a warm heart. A few very simple 
 and direct qualities perhaps in the end they reduce to 
 the marriage of courage and tenderness are the elements 
 of which the whole tissue is woven, and where these 
 elements are seen in their pure state there in potentia 
 exists the whole scheme of a rational life. Upon the whole 
 there is more of them in human nature than can express 
 itself in human life, and the problem of the practical 
 reason is not merely to educate individuals, but still more 
 to shape institutions so that they may form channels 
 within which these qualities may freely run, and where 
 their force may be used to build up social ends. 
 
 The question may fairly be asked, what thread does 
 the principle of Harmony put into our hands to guide us 
 through the maze as it exists here and now ? Does it 
 yield a complete system of life which he who wills can 
 live, or does its realization involve the conversion of 
 society ? If so, does it indicate the orientation which a 
 better society would assume ? 
 
 The questions raised must form the subject of an inde- 
 pendent enquiry. We are concerned with first principles. 
 But there are certain general problems of method which 
 are in place here, and certain difficulties of principle 
 turning upon them which should be met. 
 
 3. The general lines of method follow directly from the 
 principle itself. Every experience involving impulse or
 
 APPLICATIONS 127 
 
 feeling, if internally harmonious, is reasonably held good 
 unless it is incompatible with another such experience 
 of equally strong claims. Where such incompatibility is 
 found, modification is necessary, to the point, but only 
 to the point at which conflict disappears. Thus, to 
 put it very crudely, the function of our principle is to 
 " see fair " between the different impulses and instincts 
 of mankind. If anything appears good it either can or 
 cannot be worked into the general scheme of human 
 requirements. If it can be so adjusted all is well. If not 
 there must be such re-adjustment as yields consistency 
 of aim. It is a practical rather than a speculative 
 problem, a problem, it may be said, of organization. But 
 the organization in question is very different from the 
 mechanical contrivances which the term usually suggests. 
 Thus, to take one example, ingenious writers will show 
 us how much better the business of life might be conducted, 
 and how much more efficiently the rearing of children 
 might be carried out, if separate households were abolished 
 and the State became the universal parent. To such 
 enthusiasts for social mechanism it is a small matter to 
 cut the profoundest and most universal of all sources 
 of human emotion, and they would not hesitate to claim 
 its rationality as the justification of their method. The 
 Practical Reason, as here understood, is the antithesis of 
 any such mechanism. For it the extinction of the family 
 life and its emotions would be a " repression " of the 
 most deadly kind, and the simplification of the State 
 which it would involve would be like the simplification 
 of a picture by scraping off the paint. Its method is 
 the adjustment of the family life to the community an 
 adjustment which may or may not require far-reaching 
 changes, but would have the aim not of flattening down 
 divergencies and centres of possible opposition, but of 
 finding methods of co-operation and thus in the end of 
 even fuller expression. All toleration of differences sets 
 a problem to the social intelligence, but it is the only 
 problem worth its solving. 
 Since all difference is potential antagonism, these
 
 128 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 considerations may help to turn the edge of an objection 
 which many feel to the formula of harmony as a principle. 
 Is not strife, they ask, necessary to life, and in particular 
 to development ? Our faculties are called out to their 
 last reserves only by a contest in some shape or form. 
 A pleasant, humdrum life might, perhaps, be founded on 
 pure co-operation, but if development is part of the ideal, 
 it is contradictory to talk of abolishing that which 
 developes men to the utmost. Yet, if strife in turn is 
 carried to its utmost limit, it means mutual extinction, 
 or in the alternative, a subjection of one party so complete 
 that strife ends. Strife, then, if it plays a part in 
 development, must be conditioned by the requirements 
 of development, and we have then to ask whether it is 
 strife within and between the parts of the whole which is 
 developing, or strife between the whole and external 
 enemies which is deemed necessary. If the latter the 
 object of our strife is victory complete enough to end strife. 
 If the former, then it must be said that the development 
 of a whole requires that the parts in their growth do not 
 destroy but maintain and further one another. But this 
 is the principle of harmony again, and we reach the 
 paradoxical conclusion that the moral condition of strife 
 is the service of harmony. But, after all, is not the 
 apparent paradox a familiar truth ? A game is a contest, 
 and a good one, if we keep to the rules and play in a 
 " sporting " spirit, a bad one as soon as the spirit of strife 
 runs away. The principle holds through life. To match 
 oneself, one's side, one's party, one's country against 
 another is a deep-seated impulse which supplies a wonderful 
 stimulus to endeavour. But all depends on the rules of 
 the game. If they are good rules they are founded on an 
 underlying spirit of common service to broad ends of 
 humanity. As the game develops the element of com- 
 petition proper fades into the background. What remains 
 is rather the sight of what another does or has done as 
 a standing evidence to us of what we ought to be able to 
 do ourselves. It is the standard rather than the individual 
 that we want to beat. Competition is thus an imperfect
 
 APPLICATIONS 129 
 
 incarnation of the enthusiasm for progress. The truth 
 to which it bears witness is the vitality of independent 
 centres. The spirit of man does not develop equably 
 from a single centre, but wells up with irregular profusion 
 in thousands of distinct individuals, groups and interests. 
 Each centre pursues its own life and fights for its own 
 hand. The anarchy may be ended by the steam roller, 
 but such is not the method of permanent progress. 
 Progress lies in convincing the separate centres that within 
 and below their differences there is something common by 
 the service of which they can best express themselves. 
 
 4. But are all forms of life at bottom capable of 
 harmony ? What ground is there for any such assump- 
 tion ? Yet, if we do not make the assumption, how can 
 we go forward ? It may be replied in general terms that 
 the rational impulse is to carry harmony as far as is found 
 possible and constantly to explore the possibility of 
 carrying it still further. With regard to impulses we 
 have admitted the possibility that there may be those with 
 which it is impossible to make terms, which are in ordinary 
 phrase radically bad and of the nature of original sin. 
 Such impulses, if they exist, have merely to be held in 
 check like any untoward force in external nature. But the 
 possibility of such a situation suggests a dilemma. It 
 implies not merely a division, but an irreconcilable division 
 in human nature. Is such a division compatible with the 
 scheme of the Practical Reason ? If not, must we take 
 that scheme to postulate that the whole body of human 
 impulse is finally amenable to laws of consistency, and 
 is this postulate warranted either by experience or by 
 any true axiom ? If yes, what is to hinder us from 
 supposing that not one impulse alone, but many, might 
 prove incompatible with a rational scheme of life ? Why 
 should not the rebellious ones even turn out to form a 
 scheme of their own, establishing, so to say, a Sonderbund 
 in human nature, and if they did so, what would decide 
 between them and the orthodox constitution ? Would it 
 be force, that is the abandonment of rationality ? Or 
 would it be a question of the majority against the minority,
 
 130 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 a balance that might be precarious and in any case 
 abandons the pretension to harmony ? 
 
 The answer to these doubts lies in close attention to 
 the requirements of a rational scheme. Such a scheme 
 must be carried through life as a whole. Even if incom- 
 pletely understood as we must admit any rational scheme 
 to be it must be something which will work, i.e. by which 
 we can actually live in self-consistency, not in patches, 
 but in the whole of our conduct. Such a scheme must 
 deal with refractory impulses, just as the scheme of 
 knowledge deals with exceptions and obscurities. Our 
 knowledge seeks to explain " recalcitrant " facts, and if 
 it cannot explain them but still rejects them, has reasons 
 to give for the rejection, which thus, in a manner, does 
 fit them into its general plan. Similarly the practical 
 reason does not merely negate the obstinate impulse, 
 but shows why it is impossible. Now the impulse on 
 its side, so far as it is isolated, has no claim to rational 
 support, nor would its alliance with any other impulse 
 give it such a claim nor even with any number of impulses 
 unless out of them could be evolved a rival, equally 
 consistent scheme, professing to cover life as a whole. 
 We should then have two schemes, both apparently 
 rational but mutually incompatible, just as in science 
 we may have two hypotheses both consistent with a 
 great body of ascertained fact, but irreconcilable with 
 one another. Now in science we should say without 
 hesitation that such a position may indeed arise at a 
 certain incomplete stage of our knowledge, but it cannot 
 represent the objective truth. The truth must be single 
 and consistent throughout, so that one or other or both 
 of the hypotheses must be remodelled before the truth 
 can be known. Similarly, in practice the principle upon 
 which reason works is that of a practical consistency 
 which cannot be broken at any point. Just as a single 
 impulse requires to be harmonized with others, so does 
 a body of impulses or a system of conduct dealing with 
 any part or aspect of life require to be harmonized with 
 the rest of life, and there cannot be two incompatible
 
 APPLICATIONS 131 
 
 ways of dealing with the same situation which are both 
 in the end equally rational. So far, then, we conclude 
 (a) that the existence of one or more disconnected 
 recalcitrant impulses raises no theoretical (though much 
 practical) difficulty ; (b) that there cannot be two 
 incompatible systems dealing rationally with life as a 
 whole. 
 
 5. On the other hand and here we come to a question 
 of real importance, practical as well as theoretical it may 
 quite well happen that at a given stage of development 
 alternative systems present themselves to us as equally 
 rational. It is true that as matter of history the contrast 
 has more often been between a system resting on authority, 
 tradition, or the bare fact that it does actually work, 
 and a system derived from reasoned principles. In 
 such an event the partisans of principle seem to be on the 
 side of reason, but unfortunately the historian will not 
 always find in their favour, and the reason of that will 
 be that authority or tradition had on its side elements 
 of experience incorporated, perhaps unreflectingly and in- 
 articulately, in its scheme, but nevertheless incorporated 
 so that the scheme actually worked, while the principles, 
 however consistent internally, ignored these elements, 
 rested on too narrow a basis and so made shipwreck. 
 It is easily seen that such shipwreck is no condemnation 
 of rationalism as defined here, but, unfortunately, since 
 our lights are admittedly imperfect, the difficulty is to 
 know when we have attained a vision broad and clear 
 enough to guide us unerringly. Rationalism threatens to 
 remain an ideal to be reached at some remote time, 
 but of no use as long as man remains imperfect, that is to 
 say, during the time when it is really wanted. 
 
 We can escape from this dilemma if some principles of 
 rational living are so far certain that we may take them 
 as guides to all life, even though we confessedly do not 
 know the whole meaning of the scheme of life. This, 
 again, is our procedure in knowledge. We do not possess 
 all truth but we proceed confidently upon certain 
 principles, assured that though only a part of the truth.
 
 132 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 they are more than partially true. The moral conscious- 
 ness has generally supposed itself to be in possession 
 of such principles, sometimes, perhaps, prematurely. 
 There are, however, three rules of method deducible 
 from the general conception of a rational order, which 
 I think go a long way to meet our difficulty, both 
 theoretic and practical, and I shall content myself with 
 these. 
 
 6. The first of these rules is that any system which we 
 can accept as a step towards the rational order must be 
 a system which will " work " under the conditions in 
 which we live. By " work " I mean maintain itself. 
 A system works if men living under it so far serve 
 one another, providing for personal and common needs, 
 that the community is actually maintained. It may be 
 said that a community may be so bad that it is better 
 broken up. It needs to be " hatched over again, and 
 hatched different." Even so, the new community to 
 be put in its place must, at lowest, be one that will work, 
 and it is for the revolutionist to show that he can so 
 reconstruct society from its constituent atoms as to make 
 a better business of it than it has made of itself. 1 Ideal 
 principles which merely destroy are not right for those 
 whom they destroy, even though they might, in fact, 
 " work " with people who should fully understand them, 
 i.e. see them in relation to other principles equally 
 necessary to the operation of a rational order as a whole. 
 Thus our first principle is the truth underlying philosophic 
 Conservatism. What is good for us must " work," if 
 not literally here and now, at least in such continuity 
 
 1 Of course we are not to require the impossible of the revolu- 
 tionist. The operation of social institutions cannot be mathe- 
 matically demonstrated a priori and the only final test is the 
 experiment itself. What is intended is that the revolutionist must 
 address his arguments to the problem of practical possibility as 
 well as to that of abstract desirability and must give solid grounds 
 for the faith that is in him. As to the margin of doubt that remains 
 in all human forecasts he is entitled to say with a great Liberal, 
 of temper far from revolutionary, " Our hopes are as good as your 
 fears."
 
 APPLICATIONS 133 
 
 with what we are here and now that we can fit ourselves 
 into it without any destruction. 
 
 7. The second rule is that of philosophic Liberalism, 
 and it is simply an application of the rule that we have 
 worked upon all through the discussion. A vital impulse 
 we have seen can only be restrained legitimately on the 
 ground of incompatibility with the consistent operation of 
 life as a whole. Now, in the institutions of any society 
 which works, there are generally a great many repressed 
 impulses and impoverished personalities. In any such 
 case if a means of liberation is suggested, tending to 
 show that the system would still " work " with the new 
 element set free, the burden of proof is with the adherent 
 of the established fact. Life gains in fullness and harmony 
 by each liberation, and it is on this line that the advance 
 towards a rational order moves. Here it is those who 
 refuse movement that must produce their reasons. 
 Provided that it will work, the system which gives larger 
 scope to faculty is preferable to the system which gives 
 less scope. 
 
 8. The third rule is, I think, the principle underlying 
 philosophic socialism. We refused to admit that social 
 obligation could be founded on an intellectual apprehension 
 of the " principle of similars." But this is not to deny 
 the value of the principle as a sign-post. As the social 
 order actually evolves it is very apt to assume a very 
 desirable shape for some persons, some classes, some races, 
 and a much less desirable one for others. From the 
 point of view of general harmony it is a patchwork, good 
 in parts, and this very goodness held together by the 
 badness of the other parts. Against this patchwork 
 the principle of similars is a protest. According to this 
 principle what is good for A is good for B, unless essential 
 differences between the two can be produced. If, say, 
 nationality has its rights in Central Europe, has it similar 
 rights in Ireland, and, if not, why not ? If Ireland has 
 its Ulster so have Bohemia and Roumania. Either treat 
 these cases on the same broad principle or produce reasons, 
 applicable as general truths, for the difference. If private
 
 134 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 property is an excellent institution as an essential instru- 
 ment of personality, what is the position of classes which 
 possess no private property, or none such as will serve 
 the essential function ? What is the duty of the more 
 fortunate in their regard ? A good must be shared. In 
 anything that by its nature can only be the privilege of a 
 few, still more in any gain which by its nature is another's 
 loss, there is a radical disharmony. 
 
 9. These very simple principles contain, I think, the 
 germ of rational reconstruction. I do not here propose 
 to trace them further, but I would point out two opposed 
 dangers against which, as I think, the principle of harmony 
 is a shield. The first of these is the fanaticism of abstract 
 right, the fanaticism which sees one wrong and sees it 
 so big that it overshadows all the world, or that grasps 
 one right and would wreck society to vindicate it. For 
 the principle of harmony there is no absolute right short 
 of the entire system of human well-being, no absolute duty 
 except to serve that system to the best of our under- 
 standing. This is not to say that either " rights " or 
 " duties " are mere instruments of no intrinsic value. 
 On the contrary, they are constitutive parts of this 
 comprehending harmony. Each defines the actual lines 
 of harmonious co-operation within a certain sector of 
 life. Unfortunately, as the experience of life teaches us, 
 these sectors are ragged at the edges, and in the marginal 
 cases to draw the line with absolute certainty and precision 
 between them is not within the compass of anything 
 short of omniscience. What we have to do is to take 
 the claims and counter-claims and find the workable 
 system which will most fully meet them both, or rather 
 meet such elements in both as we are compelled to hold 
 valid. I spoke above of the rights of nationality, but 
 I should be the last to contend that any such rights may 
 be legitimately pressed without regard, for example, to 
 the effect on other nationalities. What the principle of 
 harmony will tell us is that a national claim, if deep and 
 generic, will, if not satisfied, contain seeds of disharmony 
 which repression will not kill. A right, that is to say
 
 APPLICATIONS 135 
 
 is a claim founded on some real condition of harmony. 
 If we find that we cannot admit it without violating 
 some other right, either our case is very unfortunate or 
 our practical intelligence is at fault. In either alternative 
 the disharmony will remain and will do its work. 
 
 Opposed to the fanaticism of abstract right stands the 
 worship of the Institution, the established order, the 
 State, the Church. What is established is a structure to 
 which generations of effort, it may be, have contributed, 
 which, if not pure reason, incorporates many efforts of 
 reason, more, it may be said, than any individual with 
 his narrow experience could bring together. These 
 massive structures of human making, then, seem to acquire 
 a value of their own which puts them above the life of 
 individuals. But as soon as their sanctity puts forward 
 this claim it over-reaches itself. On the principle of 
 harmony the test of the value of each structure is that 
 it operates continuously in directing the lives of men. 
 What we seek to build up is something much greater 
 than any individual, but not something in which the 
 individual is lost. The relation of harmony gives us the 
 precise clue that we require. The massive achievement 
 of the whole must be gained, not at the expense of the 
 part, but through the development of each summing up 
 in the development of all. No doubt there are occasions 
 when sacrifice is demanded, since there are numerous 
 untoward contingencies in all relations of life. But the 
 good of the whole cannot rest on the continuous sacrifice 
 of the parts. That is the condemnation of the state 
 system which rests on the perpetual requirement of 
 military servitude, or of the industrial system, which turns 
 out an increase of total wealth at the expense of a class 
 of operatives degraded to the status of machines. 
 
 To sum up, the principle of harmony has to be applied 
 to a social structure which has grown up through the 
 interaction of many forces in which the rational impulse 
 is only one element. The result is a patchwork of har- 
 monious and inharmonious elements. The method of the 
 practical reason is to found itself upon the elements of
 
 136 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 harmony that have established themselves and to generalize 
 them. But in so doing it must not be guided by a single 
 aspect of the problem to the exclusion of its bearing upon 
 the social structure as a whole. Nor, conversely, may it 
 conceive a whole as possessing a value without respect 
 to its human parts. Its reforms must " work " and in 
 working must be such as to liberate faculty, facilitate 
 co-operation and extend the sphere of fulfilment.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 IMPLICATIONS 
 
 THE theory of harmony stands in close relation on the 
 one side to the Utilitarian principle as developed by J. S. 
 Mill, and on the other hand to the form taken by Ethical 
 Idealism in the hands of T. H. Green. It will help to a 
 more concrete appreciation of the present theory to 
 examine its points of similarity and contrast with both 
 these famous doctrines. 
 
 i. The broad correspondence of the theory of harmony 
 with that of Utility is readily apparent. The harmony 
 of experience with feeling is expressed in consciousness in 
 the form of pleasure or happiness. We speak of pleasure 
 in ordinary usage when we are thinking of some passing, 
 temporary experience, some appeal to eye or ear, some 
 sensory or emotional excitement. We speak of happiness 
 when we are thinking rather of the state of the whole 
 man, and of the good or evil fortune, the successes or 
 failures, that colour a life and affect a career. The popular 
 usage corresponds to a real distinction which is, perhaps, 
 easier to draw in thought than to apply in any actual 
 case. Pleasure and pain, we may say, as they deepen 
 and broaden their roots in our personality, pass gradually 
 into elements contributing to our permanent happiness 
 or misery. But, notwithstanding all difficulties of demar- 
 cation, there is for thought a clear distinction between 
 the personality, which is a principle of synthesis, and the 
 successive impulses and experiences which are the raw 
 materials of the synthesis. To the first belong the mode 
 of action that we have called will, and the mode of feeling
 
 138 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 that we call happiness. To the second, the mode of 
 conation that we call Desire and the modes of feeling 
 that we call pleasure and pain. We should, therefore, 
 diverge from Mill in his definition of happiness as a sum 
 of pleasures. Happiness and pleasure are states of mind 
 possessing the same feeling-tone. We may, if we like, 
 take the term pleasure as generic and say that happiness 
 is a mode of consciousness dependent on the relatively 
 stable character and position of the personality as a 
 whole, and endowed with pleasurable feeling-tone. But 
 we shall not resolve happiness into a series of pleasurable 
 states. 
 
 Still less shall we accept the analysis which traces all 
 action ultimately to desire and all desire to an anticipation 
 of pleasure. Psychologically, the foundation of action 
 is impulse in which no anticipation of an end is a necessary 
 element, and impulse is modified but not eradicated by 
 experiences of pleasure and pain. Further, though this 
 experience does tend to a coincidence between desire and 
 pleasure, there is, and would remain, even if this coin- 
 cidence were far more perfect than it normally becomes, 
 a serious ambiguity in the theory that pleasure is necessarily 
 the object of desire. So far as the coincidence extends, 
 and we may admit that this covers the normal life of 
 desire in the ordinary sane person, the object of desire 
 is the experience, the action, the possession that gives 
 pleasure, but it is not normally the psychical experience 
 of pleasure which the object will give. Psychologically, 
 Butler is right as against the Hedonist when he declares 
 that desire determines upon its object. In other words, 
 desire is, or tends to be, desire for the pleasant, not for 
 pleasure. The distinction is not purely verbal, for it 
 cuts the source of the egoistic tendency in Hedonism. 
 The object that is pleasant to me, that fills me with delight 
 to contemplate, may itself be nothing of me. It may 
 be my child's delight in a Christmas festivity, it may be 
 the happiness of another man with his child. It is only 
 if analysis proceeds to the discovery that such sights 
 are desired as sources of refined pleasure to the man who
 
 IMPLICATIONS 139 
 
 seeks to bring them about, that an element of egoism is 
 imported. If I necessarily desire my own pleasure, then 
 it would seem that, however refined, however altruistic 
 the sources of my pleasure, the action that I take to secure 
 it must always, under one aspect, remain egoistic. If, 
 on the other hand, all that can be said is that what I 
 desire is also as a rule pleasant to me to realize, no such 
 implication remains, and the question whether my aims 
 will be selfish or unselfish is left entirely open by the 
 analysis of desire. 
 
 With regard to the sources of pleasure Mill himself 
 diverged from the older Utilitarians by introducing a 
 distinction of Quality, and admitting one kind of pleasure 
 to be intrinsically superior to another. The distinction, 
 while true to experience, is fatal to the maintenance of 
 simple pleasurableness as the standard of action, and 
 raises the question what sort of experience it is that will 
 yield pleasure of the most desirable quality. To this, 
 on our theory, we should reply that it is the harmonious 
 fulfilment of human powers. The end, as thus conceived, 
 does not separate happiness from the kind of life in which 
 it is sought, but treats them as two elements in the same 
 whole, as the experience and the feeling-tone which qualifies 
 the experience. The rational object of human action is 
 a type of life, not merely a type of feeling. 
 
 Closely connected with the analysis of desire is that of 
 Obligation. Mill held to the sense of Moral Obligation 
 as a real psychological force, but whether it had a rational 
 justification was not so easy for him, on his principles, 
 to determine. The sense of obligation he held to be 
 built up by educative processes and the laws of Association 
 on the basis of a substratum of sympathy or Social feeling 
 which he took to be natural. Given sufficient strength 
 in these feelings and forces, there is at any rate no con- 
 tradiction involved in the supposition that the altruistic 
 action which Mill wishes to explain might become more 
 pleasurable and the violation of its rules a source of 
 greater pain to a man than any selfish consideration. 
 Social and " unselfish " action becomes psychologically
 
 140 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 possible on Mill's view, but whether it becomes rationally 
 imperative is another question. On Mill's account all 
 action is at bottom founded on intensity of desire. The 
 stronger desire, and that is for Mill the most intensely 
 realized anticipation of pleasure, must prevail. If a man 
 already finds his greatest pleasure in promoting the general 
 happiness no question of obligation arises. But if he 
 feels nothing of the kind, or if he halts between two 
 decisions, in what sense can we tell him that he " ought " 
 to decide for one course rather than the other. In any 
 sense in which it is to express a generic motive for his 
 action the " ought " should represent some balance of 
 pleasure which will accrue to him. But can we really 
 promise him any such balance and is that seriously what 
 we mean ? What we mean when we assert an obligation 
 is that there exists a ground for the course of action 
 recommended which we, the speakers, recognize as a 
 good ground, and as good irrespectively of the particular 
 desires or inclinations of the individual whom we are 
 addressing. We believe the end we urge to be intrinsically 
 or objectively excellent, and we press its claim on others, 
 not primarily for the pleasure which it will give them to 
 advance it, but because of its intrinsic goodness. This 
 is to imply that the end is not merely something which we 
 desire but something which we believe to be rationally 
 demonstrable as the Good. 
 
 To resume, the conception of harmony so far coincides 
 with the Utilitarian doctrine as to include the general 
 happiness as an integral element, but differs from it in 
 making the form of life in which happiness is found equally 
 essential. 1 The feeling of harmony is pleasurable, and 
 in its deeper and wider developments becomes happiness. 
 
 * The distinction is more important for the theory of obligation 
 than for any applications to the social standard. For if the general 
 happiness be the sole end, yet the means must be sought in a certain 
 kind of life and this life must be socially harmonious and must 
 rest for its satisfactions on the control of life conditions by intelli- 
 gence. Thus, what we have conceived as the content of happiness 
 figures in a reasoned Utilitarianism as the means to happiness.
 
 IMPLICATIONS 141 
 
 But pleasurable feeling in abstraction from the experience 
 which yields it is not the basis or standard of action. 
 Action is not determined solely by desire, nor desire by 
 anticipation of pleasurable feeling, but a rational appre- 
 ciation of an intrinsically good life plays its part, and 
 this life is not only the basis of happiness but has its own 
 distinctive character as a harmonious development of 
 human activities. 
 
 2. Ethical Idealism, in the shape given to it by T. H. 
 Green, was deeply opposed to Utilitarianism, in its meta- 
 physical presuppositions, but much less alien to it, as 
 Green recognized, in its practical and humanitarian spirit. 
 To the conception of developmental harmony it is still 
 more closely akin. Green conceives the ethical order as 
 arising from the spiritual principle in man seeking to 
 realize itself in a Common Good. The several elements 
 in this conception, if pressed and denned, yield point 
 by point the principle of harmony in development. The 
 self-realization which is held out as the goal for each 
 personality cannot be, and is not, of course, intended as, 
 any sort of realization of any sort of self. The miser may 
 " realize " his avarice or the vindictive man his vengeance, 
 but the more the self realizes capacities of this kind the 
 worse it becomes. Self-realization must mean (a) not any 
 kind of experience in which some psychical capacity is 
 fulfilled, but an orderly development of an organic whole, 
 and (b) this development, if it is to form part of a 
 " common " good, must be conditioned by the equally 
 desirable development of other human beings. But this 
 is precisely the conception of the good as the harmonious 
 development of the life of the race as a whole. Apart 
 from the conception of harmony there is no criterion to 
 decide between the kind of development that would be 
 good and the kind that would be bad. 
 
 So far the present account appears only as a further 
 definition of Green's principle. Certain important points 
 of divergence, however, must be noticed. In the first 
 place, Green insists on treating the element of pleasure 
 in the good rather as a secondary consequence than as
 
 142 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 an integral and essential element. In this he has as 
 much over-estimated the part of impulse as the empirical 
 school over-stated the part of experienced feeling. If 
 the argument of previous pages is sound, feeling holds the 
 reins, though impulse is often a refractory steed, and the 
 more rational we become, the clearer is the coincidence 
 between the lines of life which we seek to lay down and 
 those in which, if not actual happiness, at least real peace 
 and inward satisfaction are found. This view has been 
 combated generally because it was supposed to be his 
 own enjoyment or satisfaction which was being recom- 
 mended as the object to the individual. But for this 
 limitation there is on rational principles no warrant. 
 What is intended is simply that the harmony of experience 
 with feeling which is the basis of happiness, is an essential 
 element in the harmony of experience with experience, 
 which is the basis of organic development. The good is 
 nothing if it does not appeal to feeling, just as feeling is 
 nothing if there is no object to excite it. 
 
 3. A second point to be noted is that the term self- 
 realization often seems to suggest too optimistic a solution 
 of fundamental ethical difficulties. 
 
 If, indeed, the social harmony were perfect, we might 
 lay down that the good of the whole would be the synthesis 
 of the good of each member. For the full development 
 of every personality is conditionally good conditionally, 
 that is, on its capability of harmonization with the 
 development of others. All that in each individual might 
 be so harmonized, we include in the term " social 
 personality " and the failure of any social personality to 
 achieve its full development is a net loss. Thus the most 
 perfect social harmony must provide the fullest develop- 
 ment for each social personality, and that is the good 
 for each. But a social harmony which is only emerging 
 very gradually from the condition of moral chaos and 
 has to work itself out under the conditions of a non-moral 
 nature never, in fact, presents so complete a consistency. 
 The actual needs of the social order at any given time may 
 thus involve the curtailment of developments for which
 
 IMPLICATIONS 143 
 
 a higher harmony might readily find place. The service 
 of society may require the entire sacrifice of happiness 
 or life on the part of an individual. To say that the 
 individual so sacrificed realizes his own highest good in 
 sacrificing himself is at best a half truth. Taken alone, 
 it is highly misleading. The individual sacrificed does 
 not achieve that internally harmonious development in 
 which his happiness consists, and which, under conditions 
 of true harmony, would constitute his personal share in 
 the common good. A society which should uniformly 
 impose such sacrifice on all its members would not be 
 making for that development of human powers in which 
 we have found the rational good. Hence, such a sacrifice 
 can only be a means and not an end, not a good in itself. 1 
 That the sacrifice should be made is the best thing for 
 society under the circumstances if it is positively required 
 to maintain or improve the existing social order. And 
 if it is the best thing for society, it is also the best, i.e. 
 the least bad, thing under the circumstances for the 
 individual. It is his duty, and the worst thing he can do 
 is to shirk his duty. It is also, as regards feeling, the 
 way, not, indeed, of Happiness, but of Peace, i.e. of a 
 sense of Unity with mankind and with the general end 
 and aim of life. But it is not the good for the individual 
 in the sense of that which it is generally desirable that 
 the individual should attain. It is rather that good of 
 which unfortunate circumstances alone admit. 
 
 It may be asked how, if we admit real self-sacrifice, 
 we can justify it rationally to the individual. But the 
 question involves a misconception. The rational good is 
 not the good for the individual as an independent unit, it 
 is the good of the whole of which he forms a part. The 
 
 1 What is good in itself is the sense of one-ness with others and 
 the desire to serve whether it take the form of Love or Sense 
 of Duty which make men ready for self-sacrifice. That there 
 might be some elements of sacrifice beyond the obvious necessity 
 for self-control in the ideal order is conceivable, but they would 
 be discords 'tuned to constitute a higher harmony. The absolute 
 destruction of life, the permanent blighting of happiness or eradi- 
 cation of faculty can be necessary only where harmony is imperfect.
 
 144 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 governing principle to which the analysis of the good and 
 the reasonable led us was that it is reasonable so to act 
 as to further the good of the whole. That good if perfected 
 would not involve such utter sacrifice of individuals as is 
 here contemplated. On the contrary it would be a 
 harmony in which the lot falling to each individual would 
 be unambiguously good for him. Yet in the effort to 
 establish such harmony in a discordant world sacrifice 
 is often necessary. 1 The obligation which, then, lies 
 upon the individual to sacrifice himself is founded on his 
 relation to the whole. Psychologically its condition is 
 that the conational synthesis constituting the main bent 
 of his personality is governed in the last resort by his 
 conception of the whole or of certain principles which 
 fashion the life of the whole. The obligation is rationally 
 justified, that is to say, it is real or true in the sense in 
 which any moral judgment can be real or true, as con- 
 tributing to the rational good. It is psychologically 
 effective in so far as the practical attitude of the individual 
 is adjusted to that true good. Thus, even if we insist that 
 in self-sacrifice the individual is choosing the least bad, 
 and, therefore, the relatively good, for himself, that is 
 not the rational motive. The rational motive is that his 
 action furthers the general good. If we pass from the 
 question of motive as it presents itself to the agent to 
 that of actual gain or loss, as it may be judged by a 
 by-stander, we may say that what a man loses in self- 
 sacrifice is his own personality the development of his 
 own life with its attendant happiness and what he gains 
 is the harmony of entire identification with the wider life 
 
 1 It need hardly be said that morally there is a deep distinction 
 between voluntary sacrifice and one imposed by the community 
 on the individual. In the former there is at least a partial 
 reconciliation, the individual gaining the immense relief of a har- 
 mony underlying the disharmony. In the latter there is no such 
 compensation. It can be justified only as a less evil than social 
 disorder or the frustration of common effort. It is clear, how- 
 ever, that a social order which imposes real loss of well-being 
 on any of its members is far more gravely imperfect than one which 
 can repose on voluntary self-sacrifice at need.
 
 IMPLICATIONS 145 
 
 with its attendant sense of peace. This is " his " good in 
 the sense that it is that which hard circumstances apportion 
 to him " his " good judged from the objective standpoint. 
 It is not his good either (a) in the sense of that which an 
 ideal harmony would apportion to him, or (b) in the sense 
 of that which he would choose if he considered the matter 
 from his own point of view. If, then, we are asked whether 
 in self-sacrifice the individual does or does not abandon 
 his good, we must affirm or deny it, according to the sense 
 in which the words are taken. The essential points are 
 (i) that he sacrifices the good of self, so far as it is con- 
 ceived in antithesis to the good of the whole ; (2) that 
 the reason for this sacrifice is not that it is a truer good 
 for the individual, but that it is for the good of the whole ; 
 (3) that the necessity of such sacrifice rests on existing 
 disharmonies, that is to say, is bad. The realization of 
 the common good cannot, therefore, be regarded in an 
 optimistic spirit as a simple sum of self-realizations. 
 
 4. We cannot face the facts of self-sacrifice without 
 raising once more the question of the effectual force of 
 the motives which attract us to the rational system. 
 The part must accommodate itself to the whole or must 
 be sacrificed. Will it consent ? Let us put the difficulty 
 first in the form of an objection which may be urged 
 against all Rationalism, and which, though perhaps more 
 often felt than plainly expressed, is the greatest stumbling- 
 block in its path. It is based on what may be called an 
 apparent discontinuity of values. To men possessed by 
 some enthusiasm, some religion, some passion, the whole 
 world seems cheap as the price of their heart's desire. 
 Such an enthusiasm, it may be said, though justly con- 
 demned if the object is unworthy, is yet the sole basis of 
 the higher life of man. Take it out of humanity and life 
 collapses like a pricked bladder, or, to take a more appro- 
 priate metaphor, ceases to move like a mechanism from 
 which the mainspring is gone. What, then, is to be the 
 attitude of the rationalist to enthusiasm and passion ? 
 Is he to accept it as necessary to all movement ? If so, 
 what becomes of his accurate adjustment of values in 
 
 10
 
 146 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 presence of a force which over-rides all considerations 
 but those of its own imperious will ? Is he to reject it 
 as a disturbing factor ? If so, where is he to look for the 
 onward impulse in humanity ? 
 
 To state the case in somewhat broader and more general 
 terms. Must we not recognize that there is in the normal 
 course of human development a phase analogous to what, 
 in certain forms of religious experience, is called con- 
 version ? In response sometimes to a personal passion, 
 sometimes to a social movement or a religious influence, 
 the outlook on life is immeasurably deepened and widened. 
 The whole sense of values undergoes a change. The 
 petty cares and small daily pleasures become so much 
 dross. What is real, what counts, is the interest of a 
 deeper, more spiritual life, no fragment of which would be 
 bartered for all the world outside. But these last words 
 suggest that we are here abandoning the conception of 
 life as a whole, for the sake of some one thing that is 
 worth all others. It may be the fulfilment of a perfect 
 love : 
 
 I am named and known by that moment's feat, 
 
 There took my station and degree, 
 So grew my own small life complete 
 
 As Nature obtained her best of me, 
 One born to love you. Sweet. 
 
 It may be the sense of union with God. It may be the 
 achievement of self-conquest and the deliberate and final 
 absorption of self in the cares of Humanity. In each 
 case, the change seems to constitute a division, a deep 
 cleavage between the world of real values and the outer 
 husk of things which are superficially important. Can 
 such a fissure be justified in reason, and, if so, can practical 
 life form a coherent whole ? Or is it contrary to reason, 
 and, if so, must we not admit henceforward that the 
 highest development of the ethical spirit is away from 
 reason and not towards it ? 
 
 The reply that may be made is that it is precisely here 
 where the difficulty seems greatest that the claim of 
 reason, rightly understood, is most securely based. For
 
 IMPLICATIONS 147 
 
 what, after all, is the test of this deeper reality ? What 
 but that it justifies itself in experience taken as a whole ? 
 The object of our worship may be a false god or a true ; 
 our love may be deep-rooted in the realities of two natures, 
 or it may be the froth of physical fascination ; our social 
 enthusiasm may be grounded in a real relation of our 
 microscopic selves to the vast life of humanity, or in 
 sentimentality and verbiage. What test is there but 
 in the living ? If love is the glamour of a moment, he 
 who gives the world for it makes a bad bargain. If it 
 is a premonition of all that a woman can be to a man 
 and all that she can make of him, if this life-long experience 
 could be focussed clearly in the prevision of a golden hour, 
 it would, in terms of cold logic, more than justify the 
 feeling of that hour. The time of romance may be that 
 of tragic self-deception, but it is as often that of the truer 
 insight, imperfectly sustained in less inspired moments 
 Between truth and falsity the test comes in the world 
 of prose. There is a deeper plane of being than that of 
 our everyday experience, but the relation between them 
 is not that of two separate orders of reality, but of 
 underlying forces to the play of their effects. The relation 
 is equally misunderstood by every form of idealism, 
 supernaturalism, Romanticism, asceticism, which dis- 
 regards the trivial round, and by the Naturalism which 
 recognizes no spring of deeper forces below the surface. 
 To recognize a deeper order of reality is only the beginning 
 of wisdom. To see that our dim and emotional appre- 
 hension of its nature must be brought to the test of hard 
 fact, and that ultimately this test involves the consilience 
 of inferences drawn from the entire realm of experience 
 is a further step, which restores unity to our world while 
 providing a means to distinguish truth from illusion. 
 It is because the deepest truths are illustrated in the whole 
 texture of experience that, particularly in ethics, those 
 who have most thoroughly mastered the profoundest 
 principles can express them in the most elementary 
 teaching and illustrate them with the simplicity of child- 
 hood.
 
 148 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 But it may be urged, admitting all that can be said of 
 the reasonableness of regarding life as a whole, what of 
 the actual motive forces. What is there to control passion ? 
 We have contended above that reason may compel us to 
 face a real and uncompensated self-sacrifice. We are 
 contending now that it will compel us to review our deepest 
 impulse in the light of life in its completeness. Reason, 
 the reply will be, may say what she likes but has no such 
 power. The objection has come to the surface at more 
 than one point and we have staved it off by explaining 
 that for us the practical Reason is not a faculty enthroned 
 on the judgment seat above impulse, but is the synthesis 
 of impulse itself, made aware of its goal. But when we 
 come up against the deepest things in life we cannot be 
 content with abstractions but are forced to ask, what 
 goal ? The individual must be anchored on something 
 outside himself, something greater and more stable if he 
 is to stand against these triple waves. What allegiance, 
 then, does Reason offer him as the core or foundation of 
 that synthesis of emotional interest which is to keep his 
 life steadily pointed in one direction ? The community, it 
 may be suggested, offers the required anchorage. Men 
 will, in fact, offer their lives and their all for its advance- 
 ment. But the life of any existent community will not 
 satisfy all the requirements of the case. The moral 
 whole is not the same thing as the social. Every society 
 of any significance is in greater or less degree organized, 
 but moral relations arise between any two persons that 
 come into contact however temporary and slight. More- 
 over, the moral order to which we owe allegiance is at 
 once wider and more fundamental than any form of 
 social organization, and is the standard by which we 
 judge such organizations, not a rule which we submit to 
 their requirements for criticism. Yet it is eminently 
 social and prescribes social co-operation wherever this is 
 physically possible, that is, so far as human beings come 
 into contact with one another. Can we say, then, that 
 the whole which it postulates is Humanity, or, conceivably, 
 the entire sentient creation ? If we do, we are in some
 
 IMPLICATIONS 149 
 
 danger, as has been hinted above, of confusing actualities 
 and ideals. It is the ideal of Harmony that humanity 
 should become one co-operative whole, but for long ages 
 humanity subsisted in scattered groups, many not even 
 knowing of one another's existence, and even now it is 
 split up into groups sundered by bitter and largely irrational 
 animosities. We have noticed two forms or kinds of 
 unity involved in the moral judgment. One is the unity 
 of the universal, which recognizes a fundamental similarity 
 of character in all human beings, and the universal 
 applicability of the fundamental rules of right and duty 
 to all who come into contact. The other is the unity of 
 co-operation between all who have, in fact, come into 
 contact. The first of these principles is clearly the basis 
 of the second, and the unity inherent in the moral order 
 is a principle of development working itself out in a fuller 
 and more extended social co-operation. By the completion 
 of this process Humanity would form an actual unity; 
 but of the present and still more of the past we can only 
 say that its unity is potential, i.e. that conditions exist 
 out of which it may arise and among them a germinal 
 principle which makes for its development. This principle 
 of concord is the moral order itself. 
 
 At this point it will be said, men will not recognize 
 allegiance to anything so abstract and impalpable as the 
 moral order. Propound this to them nakedly and they 
 will revolt. They need something concrete and living. 
 In short, they need a Person, and if neither the community 
 nor Humanity is a person, and still more if Humanity is 
 but an unrealized ideal, they need a God. A personal 
 God is the incarnation of the unity which the moral 
 judgment requires, and without one the moral order falls 
 to pieces like an arch without a keystone. The argument 
 recalls that of Kant, in which God and immortality were 
 called in by the moral consciousness to redress the balance 
 of this life and equate performance with result, virtue 
 with happiness. In the Kantian form it involved a two- 
 fold error of logic, contradicting the principle of duty for 
 duty's sake without question of consequences, and most
 
 150 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 insecurely balancing a theory of the actual constitution 
 and government of the universe on the requirements of 
 humankind. 
 
 It is important to dwell on both of these errors, because 
 they touch on the fundamentals of the relation between 
 morals and religion. The first raises the question of a 
 moral sanction. Is moral obligation enforced or backed 
 by anything of the nature of reward or penalty ? If not, 
 can we hold to our position that obligation is a fact, whether 
 we recognize it or not ? If yes, can we say that the obliga- 
 tion is genuinely moral and not prudential ? The reply 
 to both questions is that moral obligation consists in 
 the real goodness of the moral order and the real badness 
 of violating it. Any consideration lying outside this 
 order, as, e.g., a penalty attached by law, is not of a moral 
 kind, and the act which it induces a man to perform is 
 not a moral act. To rest moral obligation, then, on 
 prudential or, generally, on external considerations is 
 to annihilate it, as all clear-headed thinkers have realized. 
 On the other hand, precisely because the moral order is 
 a coherent whole no violation of it stands alone. It is in 
 vain that we seek to cheat ourselves. There are some 
 duties which we like and others which we would gladly 
 shirk, just as there are some people to whom we wish to 
 do justice and others to whom we do not wish to do justice. 
 Now what the rationality of the moral order tells us is, 
 to put it bluntly, that we cannot both eat our cake and 
 have it. Not only does one false step lead to another 
 and one failing threaten to develop into general weakness, 
 but even the half-unconscious wrong operates as a centre 
 of disturbance and disharmony. Psychological analysis in 
 its more recent form very strongly suggests that that 
 familiar figure, the man of smug respectability, conscious 
 of rectitude, is below the level of his consciousness a very 
 different being. All the suppressed disharmonies of his 
 nature are there operative, maintaining a smouldering 
 disaffection that breaks out sometimes into flashes of 
 disturbing emotion of which the origin is obscure to the 
 sufferer himself, sometimes into physical disease. The
 
 IMPLICATIONS 151 
 
 fundamental source of these disharmonies is the failure 
 of adequate and mutually consistent expression for the 
 radical and insuppressible impulses. Such consistency 
 could only be attained in completeness in a perfect order 
 both within and without, that is to say in a full and final 
 adjustment of the individual to his society, or rather, 
 let us say, to the universe. Such adjustment is, therefore, 
 not entirely within the power of the individual. But 
 there is one great source of disharmony which he can avoid, 
 namely, insincerity. Insincerity means the nominal and 
 external acceptance of a principle or a discipline, such, 
 e.g., as Christianity and its adaptation by various shifts 
 and devices to normal conduct. These shifts do not touch 
 the real disharmony, which continues operative below 
 the threshold of consciousness, always thrust down by the 
 aid of some plausible phrase, but only to pursue its 
 machinations with the greater secrecy. It is here that 
 logic and not only the deeper logic of ideas but even 
 the logic of words plays an effective part in personal 
 morals. People seldom rebel quite openly and avowedly 
 to themselves against a principle which they accept. 
 What they do is to get hold of an exegesis accommodating 
 principle to desire and custom, which makes for conscious- 
 ness a sufficient reconciliation. All the time they know 
 that the reconciliation is hollow, and when a better logic 
 exposes the sophistication they are forced to reopen the 
 whole question. Psycho-analysis tells us that the first 
 step towards re-establishing harmony is to bring the hidden 
 discrepancies to light, and that is the service which a 
 sound ethical logic performs for the individual. 
 
 Now to hold that men are happy in proportion to their 
 fidelity to the moral law as they understand it would be 
 a very undue optimism. The psalmist who, having been 
 young, now was old, and yet never saw the righteous 
 forsaken nor his seed begging their bread, was playing 
 just one of those tricks with his own judgment by which 
 principles are adapted to facts. We cannot have it both 
 ways, insisting, on the one side, on the reality of self- 
 sacrifice and the supremacy of duty over every selfish
 
 152 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 consideration, and on the other hand, comforting ourselves 
 with the assurance that the good God will make it all up 
 to the sufferers and wipe away all tears from their eyes. 
 We cannot consistently strike a noble attitude pro- 
 claiming virtue its own reward, and the next moment 
 begin surreptitiously re-introducing extraneous rewards 
 for virtue. What we can justly say is that virtue is its 
 own reward valeat quantum, while the penalties in which it 
 involves its adherent up to, it may be, social ostracism 
 and death are equally real. The " reward " consists 
 in this, that the moral order is a connected system which 
 is the basis of an inward as well as an external harmony. 
 This inner harmony is a condition of our own happiness 
 and we cannot, as we are often tempted to think, violate 
 it when we choose and yet preserve it. It is just to this 
 extent that moral obligation carries a genuine and com- 
 pletely moral sanction. At the same time it must be 
 remarked that the efficacy of this sanction depends on the 
 close adaptation of the accepted moral code to the real 
 conditions of harmony. If this adaptation were exact, 
 if, that is, the traditional morality of any community 
 were perfectly rational, it would express a perfect harmony 
 within each of us in congruity with a no less perfect harmony 
 in relation to our community. Actual morality is far 
 from this, and sometimes the rebel against such morality 
 gets nearer to the true conditions of harmony, yet at the 
 cost of sharp divergencies between himself and his fellows. 
 If such a rebel is able to formulate the higher or wider 
 principle he does not feel this discrepancy so much. He 
 is consciously the servant of God, or the ideal, or humanity 
 and his differences with his neighbours fall into their 
 place in his mind as one of the crosses that he has to bear. 
 The rebel of a lower order, moved primarily by his own 
 passions, is in less favourable case. Yet of him, too, 
 we often feel that he is actuated by what we call human 
 nature, i.e. by legitimate impulse-feelings for which 
 society gives no adequate scope. In the moral account 
 between this man and his community, it is not easy to 
 say offhand where the balance of debit and credit lies.
 
 IMPLICATIONS 153 
 
 The inner harmony, then, which alone is " virtue's 
 reward," in the genuine sense is partially, but not wholly, 
 within the power of the individual. But such as it is, 
 it is an indispensable condition of happiness and cannot 
 be violated without either a painful process of restoration 
 or a progressive deterioration avowed or otherwise. On 
 the other hand it is only one condition of happiness. 
 It is all very well for the philosopher in his study or the 
 preacher in his pulpit to rise superior to the " external 
 goods." Many of these may be dross, but what of wife 
 and child, the safety and honour of our country, the success 
 or failure of our cause ? When Epictetus tells us that 
 these have nothing to do with our good, we can only reply 
 that the man who wraps himself in his own virtue will 
 find it threadbare. If we are to weigh the respective 
 chances of happiness for the good man and the bad, 
 we must put against the internal harmony of the one the 
 insensitiveness of the other which protects him from a 
 thousand sorrows to which a ready sympathy and a warm 
 imagination expose us. It is not because these qualities 
 bring felt happiness to their owner, but because of their 
 permanent value to the world that we hold them extremely 
 admirable. If we could make the world no better than 
 it is, it would be best to grow a hard outer shell as some 
 do and retire within it. 
 
 5. It results that, though the moral sanction is quite 
 real and very serious in its own sphere, no consideration 
 of our personal happiness can be the final basis of obliga- 
 tion. That basis is the goodness of the universal harmony 
 and the badness of everything that conflicts with it. 
 This brings us to the second question whether men can, 
 in fact, feel an allegiance to an abstraction as this ideal 
 will be considered or must personify it in a God before 
 they can own a duty which will stand up to interest and 
 passion. Unfortunately we cannot create a God out of 
 our own needs, and it is not our business to create the 
 illusion of one. As to the appeal of the rational good, 
 no one supposes that a philosophic formula, be it universal 
 harmony or anything else, excites the imagination or
 
 154 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 stimulates devotion. The purpose of these formulas is 
 merely to express the coherence or common tendency of 
 all the higher impulses and nobler objects of endeavour. 
 Each of these has a great and real hold on our allegiance, 
 and they are fortified if and in so far as they are seen to 
 be not opposed, but mutually consistent and even mutually 
 necessary. The abstract terms in which their relationship 
 may be formulated are not supposed to excite profound 
 emotions. What they are supposed to do is to provide a 
 basis on which such emotions already in being and operating 
 in their several ways may be enabled to substitute co-opera- 
 tion for conflict. A man loves his country and loves 
 truth. Many people seem to find great difficulty on 
 occasion in reconciling these emotions, or, rather, they 
 reconcile them without admitting the difficulty by the 
 method described above of degrading the love of truth to 
 the position of a subconscious rebel. This is weakening 
 to both emotions which, when reconciled, become steadier 
 and obtain a firmer hold on us. When patriotism itself 
 makes us face the truth and tell the truth, perhaps, to 
 an excited and incredulous mob, it has certainly strength- 
 ened its hold on us to the point at which we become 
 indifferent to the inevitable cry of Traitor. So is it, 
 also, with other emotions and elements of impulse- 
 feeling. No formula creates them, but the more we find 
 for them a line of harmonious activity the greater their 
 vital energy and the stronger their hold upon us. The 
 goodness of the life which our formula expresses, and the 
 hold that it has on us, do not lie in the formula, but in 
 all the energy of passion acting in a unison which the 
 formula expresses. The life so governed is not any the 
 less good, does not command our allegiance any the less, 
 because the words in which we seek to express it have all 
 the coldness of exactitude. 
 
 Moral exhortation in its place is a good thing. Cool 
 enquiry into truth is also a good thing. The mixture 
 of the two is a bad thing, indeed, sometimes a rather 
 nauseous compound, and the case is not altered though 
 the truth that we are enquiring into is the truth about
 
 IMPLICATIONS 155 
 
 morals. Our business here is to enquire into the content 
 and the rationality of moral judgments, and we must try 
 to keep as closely as possible to the facts, with the least 
 disturbance from the emotional atmosphere in which 
 facts of this particular order are steeped. Now we have 
 conceived the moral judgment as laying down something 
 that can be regarded as a fact, and the body of moral 
 judgments accordingly as stating or implying a certain 
 body of truth. Further, if we are right in regarding the 
 moral system as rationally justified, the assertions or 
 implications of fact that it contains must be valid, that 
 is to say that what it asserts is real. What, then, precisely 
 does it assert, or imply, as to the existence of Deity ? 
 This will partly depend on what is meant by Deity. The 
 moral system directly or indirectly asserts, we have seen, 
 a tie which is universal and independent of any particular 
 social organization between all rational, perhaps all 
 conscious beings, that come into relation with one another. 
 As a consequence, it asserts a more concrete unity between 
 those who stand in permanent relations to one another. 
 It is essentially concerned with the conditions of harmony 
 and disharmony among such persons, and thus involves 
 a unity of a kind that we may fitly call spiritual in their 
 lives. The lives and actions of separate minds, though 
 seemingly locked up in separate bodies are, in fact, inter- 
 related just as two magnets, though separate bodies, 
 are interrelated by definite attractions and repulsions. 
 We are free to call this a spiritual union, but are we free 
 to call it God ? If so, to which of the many social unions 
 shall we apply the term ? Hegel seems to have thought 
 quite deliberately, and rhetoric apart, that the State 
 might be so regarded, but the Olympus so constituted 
 has not proved a very happy one. On our principles it 
 is clear that if we are to find God in this line of search at 
 all it will be not in any minor or more partial association, 
 but in all Humanity. But as to this we must remark*: 
 (i) Humanity, if a spiritual unity, is not a Person. Per- 
 sonality and sociality may, perhaps, both be regarded as 
 spiritual principles of unity, but they are not the same
 
 156 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 principles. They are species of a genus, but quite distinct 
 species. (2) Humanity is a growing rather than a matured 
 unity. There is the basis of this unity in the moral order 
 and its partial realization in social life. We are, in fact, 
 dealing here with something in change and growth, 
 something of which the future is even clouded and un- 
 certain. (3) Humanity is confined to an inconsiderable 
 member of one solar system. The moral unity of which 
 the growth of Humanity is itself the outcome appears 
 to claim a more universal application, provided there be 
 any beings to apply it to in other worlds and any means 
 of intercourse. It is a poetical license to say that duty 
 preserves the stars from wrong, but not to maintain that 
 duty would apply to any rational beings that may exist 
 on the surface of a star. Whether such beings exist we 
 have no direct means of knowing, but it is hardly to be 
 supposed that the strange and rich development of mind 
 is peculiar to one little fragment of a single solar system. 
 The universe, so far as we know it, is of one tissue through- 
 out, and it is reasonable to suppose that any principle 
 of universal applicability is also one of general application. 
 In any case the reality which the moral order implies is 
 a spiritual principle, which, from its most salient feature, 
 we may call briefly the principle of Love, actively operative 
 in correlating and so determining the activities of all 
 conscious beings in proportion to the grade of their 
 development, and by its operation building up commu- 
 nities of extending scope, culminating in an incipient 
 union of human-kind. 
 
 6. It is here that the real importance of ethical theory 
 to cosmic philosophy is seen. We said above that if 
 ethical theory is valid its implications of fact must be 
 taken as true. Therefore, certain realities can be inferred 
 from ethics. But it should not need to be said that the 
 moment ethics makes this claim it lays itself open to 
 the possibility of contradiction by other investigations. 
 Thus, if, e.g., Ethics postulated immortality, and any other 
 branch of science could be held to disprove immortality, 
 one or the other must be unsound. There would then be
 
 IMPLICATIONS 157 
 
 a conflict wherein we should not know what to believe, 
 but must seek to resolve it, as we do when two physical 
 sciences come into conflict, by further investigation. 
 Thus Ethics can no more dogmatize about reality as a 
 whole than can any special science. It can only propound 
 a view which, if it is to be finally substantiated, must be 
 proved consistent with views derived from other methods 
 of investigation. Now what ethical theory establishes 
 according to the argument here pursued is (a) that the 
 Good is a Harmony and (6) that while Harmony is an 
 unrealized ideal, the ties that make for Harmony are 
 real and operative. Of these principles the second is 
 an assertion of fact which accordingly challenges criticism 
 from the sciences which deal with matters of fact. In 
 the view briefly referred to below (and explained in the 
 writer's Development and Purpose] the ethical claim is 
 substantiated upon a critical examination of Development. 
 But conversely, the ethical analysis which identifies the 4 
 good with harmony is of the first importance to the 
 theory of Development. For in this theory development 
 rests upon a principle making for harmony in a world 
 of discord. On the view here taken, that is the same 
 as a principle making for the Good, or, in other words, 
 a teleological principle. Ethical theory thus sets out 
 the conditions of a teleological view of reality, defines the 
 nature of the end, specifies the resistance to be over- 
 come, and indicates what the theory of development 
 confirms that the teleological factor is only one part 
 of the explanation of the world-process. 
 
 In regard to such a principle, two questions arise which 
 cannot be answered by the practical reason alone. The 
 first is as to its scope and power, the second as to its 
 concrete embodiment or real being. The first question 
 can only find its answer in a general theory of the nature 
 of reality, as to which I must here confine myself to stating 
 succinctly the view arrived at by an argument from else- 
 where. On this view Reality is an interconnected system 
 which develops in time, the principle of rational harmony or 
 Love being the permanent underlying ground of develop-
 
 158 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 ment. This principle is not the ground of Reality, but 
 only of the development which takes place in Reality, 
 subduing as it advances the equally real and significant 
 element of disharmony. The scope of the principle is, 
 therefore, accurately expressed in the formula " uni- 
 versally applicable " rather than " universal in operation." 
 But there should be this rider that the principle, being a 
 principle of development, is a creative force always at 
 work in extending its own field of application. Briefly, 
 if this view is correct the principle will ultimately domi- 
 nate the universe. 
 
 What, then, is the nature of its embodiment or concrete 
 realization ? In its completeness it is clearly not personal 
 in the simple and straightforward sense. On the contrary, 
 it includes unnumbered personalities. We may suppose 
 it to transcend personality a. the purest love does in 
 depth as well as in extent, and may, therefore, justly 
 name it super-personal. But what of its incompleteness ? 
 How does it exist now, and in what form has it maintained 
 tself in the dark ages of chaos ? We must beware of 
 too facile an argument. Gravity is a universal principle, 
 in that all that is material gravitates. But we do not 
 suppose a God of weight, or that there exists somewhere 
 concretely embodied a Principle of gravitation, from which 
 the tendencies of separate bodies towards one another 
 emanate as though by an efflux. We are not to infer 
 directly from a potency of love in the universe to a God 
 of Love from whom it flows. What we may more justly 
 argue is that once regarding Reality as a whole, we must 
 look for the principles of its explanation within. It must 
 explain itself as it cannot be explained by anything 
 external. From this, if it is a process of development, 
 it will follow that its maturity or completeness cannot 
 be regarded as an external or casual result of its initial 
 condition. The whole is the entire process, and any one 
 phase, including the beginning and the end, is only a part 
 of this process, determining, but also determined by the 
 remainder. A process thus determining and determined 
 by its own outcome is of the nature of Effort, and the
 
 IMPLICATIONS 159 
 
 world-development must therefore fall under this category. 
 What we call Time is the common measure of the series 
 of changes interfused with this effort, and what we call 
 Eternity is neither the indefinite prolongation of Time nor 
 the negation of Time, but the co-presence of past and 
 future in a Reality of which all process is but one facet. 
 It is an error of the religious mind to identify Reality as 
 a whole with God a very natural error, a kind of pious 
 exaggeration which seeks to claim plenitude of Being and 
 Power together with plenitude of goodness for the object 
 of its adoration. Nevertheless, it is an error from which 
 logical and moral contradictions arise. Reality is only 
 good in so far as goodness prevails in it, and goodness 
 prevails only through the fruition of the impulse to 
 harmony accomplished in the Time process by the sub- 
 dual of the particularism which is equally real. This 
 Effort is the creator of gods and men, of beautiful fictions 
 and of what is noble in fact, of law and morals, of science 
 and art, perhaps of what is beautiful in nature, certainly 
 of the significance of that beauty to us. Its operation 
 is intelligent and purposive and all-embracing. An effort 
 involving, even one evolving into, purpose implies Mind, 
 and Mind that makes for harmony must have some 
 unity throughout, however rudimentary its achievement. 
 Hence if the world-process is directed towards harmony 
 we legitimately infer a Mind at its centre, but the form 
 of unity which such a Mind possesses is less easily 
 determined. It is possible that personality on the one 
 hand and the social union of personalities on the other 
 are rather its creations than adequate expressions of its 
 substantive essence. 
 
 7. This view, true or false, rests admittedly not on 
 ethical reasoning alone. We are, therefore, bound to 
 consider the effect on morals if we suppose it false. In 
 point of fact by those who take a different view of ultimate 
 reality, the final value of human effort is sometimes 
 questioned. It is urged that the attempt to make human 
 life happier or better is futile if not self-defeating ; that 
 the law of evolution involves struggle and not harmony,
 
 160 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 the sacrifice of the weak to the strong, rather than the 
 chivalry or justice by which the strong lose the fruits of 
 their strength ; finally, that evolution itself is but a 
 stage in the world-process to be succeeded by dissolution 
 and the subsequent cooling of the earth and extinction of 
 the sun itself. On the last point it may be replied that, 
 if our views of the future of the solar system were as 
 certain as they are in fact speculative, they might indeed 
 affect our estimate of the relative value of different forms 
 of human effort, but they would not destroy the basis 
 of rational action. If we find ourselves in a sinking ship 
 we do not spend our last minutes, say, in studying the 
 language of the country to which we are bound. This 
 particular object has lost its value. But it remains worth 
 while to maintain order, cheerfulness and courage and, 
 in a word, to die like men. Similarly, if a geological 
 cataclysm were anticipated, not within a million years, 
 but within fifty, it would render nugatory all effort that 
 could only bear fruit in the far future. Like any other 
 condition of the environment it would limit the possi- 
 bilities of action and affect the direction of effort, but it 
 would not impair the reasonableness of making life as 
 good a thing as it could be made for the years remaining 
 to the human race. The theory of harmony as such does 
 not depend on an optimistic view of the world-process. 
 With the conception of Development here deduced from 
 that of Harmony, however, the case is different. If there 
 is a term fixed by unalterable conditions to human deve- 
 lopment, it is clearly futile to make preparations to cultivate 
 forms of social faculty which could only have their fruition 
 outside those limits. If we believe the whole course of 
 human evolution to be without significance for the Real 
 Order, if it is a process with a set term of beginning, 
 maturity and decay, like the life powers of the individual, 
 our whole conception of relative values must be gravely 
 affected. We shall place a lower estimate on all that 
 makes for the control of natural conditions by the human 
 mind, and a higher one on all that leads to resignation and 
 submission. The harmony that we shall seek will be that
 
 IMPLICATIONS 161 
 
 of the Buddhist, founded on the impermanence of things, 
 rather than that of the Greek, founded on the intrinsic 
 value, the promise and the hopefulness of life. What has 
 here been said of development is coloured, it must be 
 admitted, by the latter view, and the justification of this 
 view cannot be sought within ethics alone. If we cannot 
 infer the existence of God and immortality from the moral 
 requirement that the virtuous should be rewarded, neither 
 can we assert that human progress is boundless because 
 its transitoriness would make our ethical system incom- 
 plete. 
 
 It does not follow that ethical analysis has no light to 
 throw on the final meaning of experience, that is to say, 
 on the ultimate structure of Reality and the place of the 
 human mind therein. This light, however, as has been 
 shown, is to be appreciated only by taking the ethical 
 consciousness in relation to the general theory of evolution. 
 To what has been already said on this point I will venture 
 to add one thing which may be affirmed with confidence. 
 The conception of a " law " of progress involving essential 
 ethical disharmonies may be set down as a misinter- 
 pretation of the truth. The evolution of new types 
 through a cruel and anarchic struggle in which the majority 
 of individuals perish prematurely in each generation is 
 a process which occurs throughout the organic world, but 
 can in no genuine sense be called a permanent condition 
 of progress. On the contrary, in proportion as higher 
 types come into being they emancipate themselves in 
 greater and greater degree from the struggle, substituting 
 in ever larger measure the principle of co-operation and 
 the deliberate organization of life. The ethical principle 
 of harmony here laid down, far from being antagonistic 
 to this movement, is merely an expression for the goal 
 to which it tends. It is the principle of true progress 
 in evolution become conscious and operating with full 
 sense of its own meaning and aim in the higher organiza- 
 tion of life. There is no abysmal conflict between ethics 
 and evolution. The flower of the evolutionary process 
 is the ethical spirit. The rational harmony contemplated 
 
 II
 
 162 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 here means neither more nor less than the more perfect 
 adjustment and co-ordination of the permanent forces 
 that make for betterment in the movement in the world, 
 and which, slowly gathering vitality as civilization ad- 
 vances, now mainly require a fuller and more adequate 
 expression to secure to them the ultimate control of the 
 movement of social life.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Altruism, 42, 107 
 Anticipation, 33, 48 
 Approval, 125 
 Aristotle, 19, 99, 104 
 Art, 115 
 Axioms, 60 
 
 Beauty, 70, 116 
 Bentham, 28 
 Buddhism, 12, 13 
 Butler, 138 
 
 Certainty, 61, 64 
 
 Charity, 13 
 
 Christianity, 13, 14, 26, 29 
 
 Churches, the, 10, 14, 29 
 
 Citizenship, 112 
 
 Cobden, 28 
 
 Cognition, 54, 55, 94 
 
 Conation, 48, 49, 53, 54, 76 
 
 Conception, 112 
 
 Conduct, 19 
 
 Consciousness, 23, 33, 151 
 
 Conservatism (philosophic), 132 
 
 Consistency, practical, 130 
 
 Control, 35, Chap. II, 44 
 
 Democracy, 22 
 
 Desire, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 104, 
 
 138 
 Development, 103, 105, 107, 108, 
 
 111-13, 157 
 and purpose, 23, 157 
 harmonious, 107, 141 
 self-, 1 08 
 social, 109 
 Disharmony, 68, 73, 76, 102, 150, 
 
 151 
 
 Duties, 134 
 
 Egoism, 81, 82 
 
 Emotion, 20, 22, 24, 39, 45, 49, 56, 
 
 73. 104 
 
 and belief, 25, 27 
 End, 33, 51 
 
 Epictetus, 153 
 Equality, 28 
 Ethical idealism, 141 
 Evolution, 31, 161 
 theory of, 27, 37 
 Experience, 42, 43, 44, 51, 79, 80 
 
 Fanaticism, 134 
 
 Family, 122,123, 127 
 
 Feeling, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 49, 
 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 68, 69, 
 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80, 88, 95, 
 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 
 103, 138, 142 
 
 First principles, 78 
 
 Fulfilment, 105, 113, 114,^ 118, 
 136 
 
 God, 26, 60, 149, 153, 155, 159 
 Good, 17 
 
 the, 65, Chap. IV, 78, 81, 92, 101, 
 116, 145 
 
 the rational, 17, 114, 116, 117, 
 126, 143, 144 
 
 the realized, Chap. VI 
 Greek philosophy, 112 
 Green, T. H., 137, 141 
 Grounds, 56, 62 
 
 Happiness, 117, 138, 139 
 
 Harmony, 69-70, 71, 75, 76, 77, 79, 
 80, 81, 88, 89, 93-6, 98, 99, 
 106, 108, no, in, 113-15, 119, 
 126, 128, 129, 135, 142-4, 149, 
 
 157 
 
 and order, 103 
 Hedonism, 77, 138 
 Hegel, 115 
 Heredity, 91 
 
 Humanity, 118, 119, 148, 149, 150, 
 155. 156 
 
 Idea and belief, 28 
 Ideals, 26, 28 
 Ideas, 43, 67 
 
 163
 
 164 
 
 THE RATIONAL GOOD 
 
 Impulse, 20, 22, 29, 32, 34, 35, 
 Chap. II, 38-9, 42, 49, 50, 67, 
 89, 97-103, 129, 142 
 adjustment of, 101 
 and idea, 67, 88-9, 92 
 feeling, 29, 44, 48, 106 
 radical, 99, 100 
 Instinct, 31, 32, 35, 37, 39, 91, 
 
 92 
 
 Intellectualism, 22, 23, 31, 32 
 Intelligence, 30, 34, 91 
 Interconnection of judgments, 57, 
 
 61, 62, 63, 64, 78, 79, 94 
 Intuition, 60 
 
 Irrational, the, Chap. Ill, 101, 107 
 Irrationalism, 20, 24 
 
 Judgment, 57, 62, 79 
 immediate, 59, 60 
 of value, 79 
 sensory, 58, 59, 60 
 
 Kant, I., 149 
 
 Lao Tse, 13 
 
 Lecky, W. E. H., 14 
 
 Liberalism, 28 
 
 philosophic, 133 
 Liberty, 28 
 Love, 23, 118, 119 
 
 principle of , in, 157 
 
 Macdougall, Dr. W., 23 
 
 Make-belief, 21 
 
 Memory, 43 
 
 Method, 62, 63 
 
 Mih, 13 
 
 Mill, J. S., 137, 139, 140 
 
 Mind, 117, 118, 119 
 
 unity of, 89 
 Mind in Evolution, 23 
 Moral judgment, 73, 74, 75, 83, 84, 
 86, 87 
 
 law, no 
 
 obligation, 50, 139, 140, 150 
 
 sanctions, 150, 151, 152, 153 
 Morality, 10, n, 50, 148 
 
 group, 82 
 Morals in Evolution, 14 
 
 Nationality, 133 
 
 Objective, 57, 79, 80, 106 
 
 ends, 114 
 
 Obligation, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87 
 Organism, 37, 40 
 Organization, 127 
 
 psychic, 49 
 
 Particulars, 58 
 Perfection, 26 
 Personality, 50, 105, 106, no, in, 
 
 137 
 
 Perversity, 71 
 
 Plato, 26, 46, 72, 90, 103, 104 
 Pleasure, 76, 114 
 
 and pain, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 52, 
 
 53. 54. 55, 68, 71, 72, 96, 137, 
 
 138 
 Primitive customs, 21, 24, 25, 31, 
 
 33. 34 
 Principles, abstract, 22 
 
 of similars, 108 
 
 practical, 131 
 Progress, 109, no 
 Prudence, 85 
 Psychology, 19, 20 
 
 comparative, 30, 40 
 
 moral, 124 
 
 Psycho-physical process, 68, 96 
 Purpose, 31, 33, 34 
 
 Quietism, in 
 
 Rational good, Chap. V., 130 
 
 impulse, 80, 94, 129 
 
 reconstruction, 134 
 
 the, Chap. III., 65, 66, 82 
 Rationalism, 131 
 Reality, 15, 66, 84, 85, 89, 115, 157, 
 
 158, 159, 161 
 
 Reason, 19, 22, 29, 31, 33, Chap. Ill, 
 89, 93, 94, 1 20, 121 
 
 and impulse, 93 
 
 practical, 16, 51, 81, 88, 89, 90, 
 
 91, 115, 127, 129, 148 
 Reflection, 35 
 Religion, 51 
 Repression, 110, 125 
 Right and wrong, 83, 90 
 Rights, 134 
 Rousseau, 28 
 Ruskin, 118 
 
 Sacrifice, 135 
 Science, 15 
 
 Self, 50, 97-9, 105, in, 117, 
 119 
 
 -assertion, 15 
 
 -evidence, 60, 61 
 
 organization of, 102 
 
 -realization, 141 
 
 -sacrifice, 143 
 Sensation, 53, 54 
 Sentiment, 45 
 Sex relations, 123
 
 INDEX 
 
 165 
 
 Social development, 121, 122 
 
 institutions, 32 
 
 mind, no 
 
 solidarity, 89 
 
 structure, 124, 135 
 Socialism, philosophic, 133 
 Standard, 9, 10 
 
 the rational, 16 
 Stoic philosophy, 29 
 Strife and development, 128 
 Subjective, 56, 79, 106 
 Superficial, 100 
 Synthesis, 107 
 
 Theories, social, 21 
 Theory and practice, 26 
 social, 27 
 
 Thought, 30 
 Tradition, 109 
 Transpersonal, 88, 167 
 Truth, 57, 61, 64 
 
 Utilitarianism, 22, 137, 139, 140 
 Universals, 62, 63, 78 
 
 Value, 116, 119, 145, 146 
 Vital capacity, 114 
 Volition, 45, 46, 47 
 
 Will, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 137 
 Wohlgemuth, Dr, 44, 52, 53, 54, 
 
 55 
 Wrong-doing, 125
 
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