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HEDONISM AMONG IDEALISTS. 311 of view which makes him a moralist lies in his being alive to more and deeper aspects of unity than would appeal to the biologist or to the jurist as such. His eye is differently trained. This is exemplified by Green's investigation. 1 It flows directly from his conception of a spiritual unity gradu- ally taking form through the working of an idea of good in the experience of certain types of men. For other types of moral being the conclusion might, conceivably, be different. In such a real investigation of an ethical question the He- donic criterion, I believe, could never occur to the student's mind. So in the conflict of different ends, or in the distribution of resources, such as money and time, between different objects. The problem is altogether transformed when we state it as the endeavour to construct a solution for a highly complex situation, from what it is when we take it as a question asked in the abstract, out of all context. It is put to us again, Does a public school do a boy more harm or food ? In general, I should say, no answer can be given, n view of a particular boy, whose character and surround- ings we know, and of a particular school, there is no great difficulty as a rule in forming a fair judgment on the question. As regards the distribution of time or money, there is a difficulty which I have admitted, in bringing the higher forms of unity into relation with quantitative terms. But as in aesthetic or medicine, so in ethics, the result is obtained by a frank recognition that every solution of a problem is subject to mechanical conditions. A single question, how much a man should eat, or how loud a note must be struck, or how much colour must be put on the eye of a portrait, is meaningless ; and so is the question how much money I should give to charity, or what time I should devote to metaphysic and to bicycling. In plain words, the distribu- tion of money and time must be systematically theorised in connexion with the possibilities offered by the situation. That we are born into our theories or conventions, and most of us never know that they do the work of theories, is no objection at all, for precisely the same is true of our mental furniture of every kind. Thus a particular decision is ap- proached on the basis of a rationalised habit, dictated by the> main aim and design of life. I have formed, or have picked up, or inherited, a notion or instinct of what I can achieve and how I mean to achieve it. On this all details are- consequential, though, of course, in most lives, with a very 1 Principles of Political Obligation, sect. 233.