ETHICS AND ITS HISTORY 241
search for what they have proved unable to provide. By reply- ing to an objection, moreover, that has for some time been press- ing for attention, we shall find ourselves well on our way in this search.
The objection, strangely enough, is again in the form of an appeal to history. Thus the objector asserts that history shows unmistakably how the ideals of duty and pleasure have been more than the pure abstractions with which they have been iden- tified here; how they have been, not merely the inspiration of philosophical systems, positively and concretely interesting to scores of thinkers, but also the avowed standards and programs .of whole classes of society in practical life. Also, apart from the evidence of history, we are told that both have their devotees now. History, however, is much too easily read by many people, the present objector among them. Whether in reading history or in reading the life of the present time, it is a very serious error to take any character that determines a distinct social class for evidence of a well-rounded, self-sufficient experience, or. say, for a true unity of experience. From the social distinction between conservatives and radicals, and again between those who follow duty and those who follow pleasure; between the rigorists, whether in practice or in theory, and the hedonists, the historian has no right to deduce two separate, self-sufficient modes of life, or two independent, and accordingly satisfactory, solutions of the problem of ethics. The conditions of the rise of that problem, and their demands upon the solution of it, hold quite as forcibly for social as for personal experience. Conserva- tives and radicals, rigorists and hedonists, as forever at war with each other, exhibit, not distinct wholes or unities of experi- ence, but only the social or phylogenetic expression of the very conflict that dwells within the fact of their being in any form, personal or social, ontogenetic of phylogenetic. such a thing as ethical inquiry. It is true that distinct social characters have so commonly been regarded as meaning wholly distinct things wholly distinct sorts of people, for example, or modes of life or views of conduct that the present view, while not at all novel in some quarters, is sure to meet with considerable resistance;
