ABSTRACT AND PRACTICAL ETHICS 347
If on the other hand you desire an example of the power of a concrete idea, you may go to Professor Seeley's life of Stein who was Napoleon's contemporary. From the very first the great Prussian minister was in contact with reality. He had conceived the idea of nationality in all its depth and com- plexity as the living moral force of the time. He was almost alone among the leading men in Europe in his belief in it. Even to Goethe with his magnificent humanitarianism it seemed but a thin abstraction. Everything was against it. The national rising in Spain was a miserable failure. Austria showed no response to it. Russia was cold. Yet Stein stuck doggedly to it and in the long run, in spite of incredible discouragement and opposition, so far succeeded in organizing the national feeling in Prussia as to prepare the way for the fall of Napoleon and lay the foundation of the modern German Empire and modern Ger- man civilization. Whether the evil influence of abstract ideas may not be overruled and in the long run turned to good, as it has been asserted that the despotism of Napoleon was turned to good in that it roused the spirit of freedom in the nations of Europe, is another question. To the individual, at any rate, and especially to the individual who thirsts to be practical, it is a poor consolation to recognize that the good has triumphed and the world got its way in spite of, or even because of, his efforts to oppose it.
These illustrations are from politics. In ethics and philos- ophy the autobiography of John Stuart Mill offers an histori- cal illustration. Mill, it will be remembered, was brought up by his father in the straitest sect of the pleasure philosophy. He was trained from his youth up to look for all the law and the prophets to the utilitarian school, especially to its great founder Jeremy Bentham. Bentham's contribution to ethics (as is well known) was not his theory that happiness is the end, but that the happiness-giving properties of objects and actions may be reduced to scientific measurement and that the art of life con- sists in the just appreciation of the pleasure value of objects of desire. As a devout Benthamite, Mill sought to perfect himself
