. Our egocentricity is,
then, a predicament only so long as one stubbornly insists, to no
obvious positive purpose, on thinking of knowledge as a self-sufficing
entitative complex, like a vision suddenly appearing full-blown out of
the blue, and as inviting judgment in that isolated character on the
representative adequacy which it is supposed to claim (cf. A. W. Moore,
"Isolated Knowledge," _Journ. of Philos., etc._, Vol. XI). The way out
of the predicament for Perry and his colleagues is to attack the
traditional subjective and representative aspects of knowledge. But,
this carried out, what remains of knowledge is a "cross-section of
neutral entities" which _still_ retains all the original
unaccountability, genetically speaking, and the original intrinsic and
isolated self-sufficiency traditionally supposed to belong to knowledge.
The ostensible gain achieved for knowledge is an alleged proof of its
ultimate self-validation or the meaninglessness of any suspicion of its
validity (because there is no uncontrolled and distorting intermediation
of "consciousness" in the case). But to wage strenuous war on
subjectivism and representationism and still to have on hand a problem
calling for the invention _ad hoc_ of an entire new theory of mind and
knowledge seems a waste of good ammunition on rather unimportant
outworks. They might have been circumvented.

But what concerns us here is the ethical parallel. The egocentric
predicament in this aspect purports to compel the admission by the
"altruist" that since whatever he chooses to do must be his act and is
obviously done because he wishes, for good and sufficient reasons of his
own, to do it, therefore he is an egoist after all--perhaps in spite of
himself and then again perhaps not. The ethical realism of G. E. Moore
(_Principia Ethica_, 1903) breaks out of the predicament by declaring
Good independent of all desire, wish or human interest and
_indefinable_, and by supplying a partial list of things thus
independently good. What I do, I do because it seems likely to put me in
possession of objective _Good_, not because it accords with some habit
or whim of mine (although my own pleasure is undoubtedly _one_ of the
good things). It is noteworthy that Perry declines to follow Moore in
this (_op. cit._, p. 331 ff.). Now such an ethical objectivism can give
no account of the motivation, or the process, of the individual's
efforts to attain, for guidance in any case, a "more a