and so Mr. Spencer speaks of "that increased duration of life which constitutes the supreme end."1 Mr. Alexander substitutes for welfare the still less determinate notion of Equilibrium of the Social Order. He calls conduct good or bad as it leads to social equilibrium. "Good and bad acts and conduct are distinguished by their adjustment, or failure of adjustment, to the social order." § 6. The Summum Bonum. But even if moral goodness can be determined apart from one of the other methods, and we can thus. regard moral excellence as a summum bonum, is it the only summum bonum? Shall we, instead of a single system, have several systems of goods, each leading to the excellence of some department of human life, but none capable of subordinate relation to any of the others? We recognize the need to weigh good things against each other. Not only do we weigh obviously relative goods, e.g., two residences against each other, but even such quasi-absolute goods as life, health, and spiritual well-being are constantly compared. Even the good man may measure against each other without any strong feeling of absurdity or degradation the relative advan 1 Spencer, "Principles of Ethics," vol. i., p. 14. This expression is, however, not easily reconcilable with other passages of a more hedonistic character. 2 Alexander, "Moral Order and Progress,” p. 127. tages of a larger income on the one hand and increased educational and religious opportunities for himself and his family on the other; and while he might decide in favour of the latter if the increase of income was a matter of £50 a year, might hesitate if it was a matter of £500. Much more difficult is the position when we have to weigh physical health of oneself or others against our own, or their, moral improvement. And more difficult still when the rival goods are knowledge, or artistic creation, and moral activity. At first sight, no doubt, we admire the man who seeks at any cost the "one thing needful." But on reflection it does not seem that we should be able to say decisively that intellectual and aesthetic progress must always give way to moral. We should not be willing to purchase a small increase of virtue at the expense of a great increase of Puritan asceticism; to destroy our picture-galleries and theatres, our novels and poems, in one great bonfire of vanities. Could Romola really wish any more than Monna Brigida that all the world should turn piagnoni? Should we be willing to substitute for Shakespeare another St. Francis? The natural instinct of good men seems to assume that the various kinds of human perfection, although rivals, are yet not absolutely exclusive of each other. "That Beauty, Good, and Knowledge are three sisters If this be so we may have to do away with the idea of a single summum bonum altogether (unless we can find one which shall embrace all three), and substitute for it the conception of a cycle of ends, a self-supporting system of goods. Early speculation always tends to arrange its notions in the form of a single series. The earth rests on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise. It then seeks to complete the series by placing an absolute term, a staple in the wall from which the chain of causation, or the chain of goods, may depend. The material universe is rounded off by the primum mobile; the ethical cosmos is completed by the summum bonum. Modern thought tends to replace this hierarchical organisation by a more democratic one. The solar system is to us self-supporting; each part of it is concerned in the perpetuation of the whole. The organs and functions of the animal body are not arrayed serially and hierarchically, but form a circle of mutually interacting organs, each of which is in turn supreme and subaltern. We no longer dispute as to which is logically prior, the egg or the hen; but we regard each as necessarily involving the other. In the cycle of seed, plant, flower, fruit, seed, we may begin anywhere, and regard that term (for our special purpose) as ultimate; but we know that this is due only to a practical necessity, or a logical artifice, and that no one term is really absolute while the rest are only relative to it. In metaphysics, again, the tendency is no longer to search for an absolute criterion and basis in some one principle, as Descartes did, but to regard the whole of knowledge as a system of mutually supporting truths, each of which derives its validity from its compatibility with all the rest. May we not expect to find that in the same way the whole of human life is the end of the whole; that there is no interest absolutely final and independent of the others; that goodness is to be found in whatever furthers the whole or any part of the whole, so long as it does not interfere with the existence of the rest? Some interests are clearly subordinate, in the sense that their main importance is derived from their contributory relation to some other interest. Health is thus in the main subordinate to happiness and bodily perfection; but can we rightfully say that Truth, or Beauty, or Virtue, should ever be eliminated from human existence, in order to further one of the competing goods? The truly wise man will not seek to attain a facile unity of purpose by the denial and suppression of the rival ideals; he will seek, though often unsuccessfully, to reconcile them, trusting that as the world progresses a higher and completer conciliation will be possible than his rough and empirical one; but knowing, too, that the crudest effort at synthesis is more likely to be right than an attempt to simplify the problem by omitting half of the terms. On this view the whole of human life is good, the parts only good by reference to the whole; yet the goodness of the whole can perhaps only be expressed as the sum of the goodness of the parts. § 7. Humanity. The Comtists have put forward humanity as the end of rational action. But this theory comes practically to altruistic hedonism. "Rational nature exists as an end in itself," says Kant, and he identifies rational nature with humanity. This identification is open to question, unless we are willing to take up a definitely atheistic or agnostic position, since rational nature must include God and possible other supra-human beings. Putting aside this objection, there is the farther difficulty that Kant identifies humanity with the practical reason, mere formal will without content. But if we interpret "humanity" in a concrete sense, as the whole sum of human existence, we are perhaps led back to the end already discussed, viz., excellence, which again we saw naturally resolved itself into perfection of human existence. It is not, however, quite clear that we are bound to interpret excellence always as perfection (see § 5, above). It may be urged that we have no right to try to eliminate any fact in human nature merely because it interferes with the greatest possible sum total of perfection. It may be said that Kant's rule, "So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end, never as simply a means," is a warning to the idealist as well as the hedonist. We have no right to treat humanity simply as material on which to impress our own high purposes. No ideal is absolute. |