SOCIAL CONTROL $11
are not genuine goods, but hallucinations. To pursue them as supreme blessings is to relinquish realities for mocking phan- tasms. The worship of pain has never contributed an element of solid worth to human life which might not have been added through the gradual enlightenment of the judgment and the elevation of taste. Despite its pretensions, it has neither enriched man's experience nor unsealed new springs of joy.
Nor is this illusion so necessary as once it was. The world is passing from a " pain economy " to use Professor Patten's phrase ' to a " pleasure economy," and can, therefore, lay the moral accent differently. The cult of pain that once served to keep men from clutching at one another's means of enjoy ment is less needed, now that these means have become abundant and diffused. And what is still more important our satisfactions themselves are in course of refinement. Men are turning from material and exclusive pleasures, not startled by the wild paradoxes of the ascetic priest, but drawn by the charm of new kinds of enjoy- ment. By educating the modern world to higher and more spiritual delights, the art and culture of the Greeks, recovered to us by the revival of learning, have done more to deliver from the old ravening lust and greed than did ever Diogenes or St. Jerome. Not monkish vigils, but the pursuit of culture, blanches the face and refines the features of the modern man. With the diffusion of higher tastes, society may safely soften its official rancor against life, and serenely look forward to the time when ascetic ideas may be dismissed with thanks for their services.
V.
Moral philosophy. During the last three centuries there has been gradually disengaged from supernaturalism a system of ethical ideas which, under the name of " moral philosophy," has won with west European peoples a considerable authority of its own. This system, making its way step by step, as rationalism has beaten back theological ideas, has always professed to declare the true criteria and sanctions of conduct in lieu of those
See PATTEN'S Theory o/tkt Social Forcts.
