ent and mediaeval; it has
profited by Christian discipline and by the greater gentleness of modern
manners. It has recognised the rights of the dumb majority; it has
revolted against cruelty and preventable suffering and has bent itself
on diffusing well-being--the well-being that people want, and not the
so-called virtues which a supercilious aristocracy may find it
convenient to prescribe for them. It has based ethics on the foundation
on which actual morality rests; on nature, on the necessities of social
life, on the human instincts of sympathy and justice.

[Sidenote: Fallacy in democratic hedonism.]

It is all the more to be regretted that the only modern school of ethics
which is humane and honestly interested in progress should have given a
bad technical expression to its generous principles and should have
substituted a dubious psychology for Socratic dialectic. The mere fact
that somebody somewhere enjoys or dislikes a thing cannot give
direction to a rational will. That fact indicates a moral situation but
does not prescribe a definite action. A partial harmony or maladjustment
is thereby proved to exist, but the method is not revealed by which the
harmony should be sustained or the maladjustment removed. A given
harmony can be sustained by leaving things as they are or by changing
them together. A maladjustment can be removed by altering the
environment or by altering the man. Pleasures may be attached to
anything, and to pursue them in the abstract does not help to define any
particular line of conduct. The particular ideal pre-exists in the
observer; the mathematics of pleasure and pain cannot oblige him, for
instance, to prefer a hundred units of mindless pleasure enjoyed in
dreams to fifty units diffused over labour and discourse. He need not
limit his efforts to spreading needless comforts and silly pleasures
among the million; he need not accept for a goal a child's caprices
multiplied by infinity. Even these caprices, pleasures, and comforts
doubtless have their claims; but these claims have to be adjudicated by
the agent's autonomous conscience, and he will give them the place they
fill in his honest ideal of what it would be best to have in the world,
not the place which they might pretend to usurp there by a sort of
physical pressure. A conscience is a living function, expressing a
particular nature; it is not a passive medium where heterogeneous values
can find their balance by virtue of their de