Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/394

380 HENRY STURT : otherwise it would profit us nothing." 1 The practical drift of Plato's Republic is no less certain, though scarce so plainly put. They both wanted to find the best life the best life iri the best city by preference, but, failing that, the best life in such cities as ordinary men had to live in. To put it shortly, the question with the early moralists is : How to be happy? Now to formulate the question of ethics in an eudaernonis- tic form is more than half-way towards an eudsemonistic answer. Logically, such an answer is not inevitable. It is possible to ask : What is happiness ? or, How can one attain the supreme good? and to state the conditions of attainment without making any concession to eudaemonism. But, as a fact, no writer has ever done this. All who have approached ethics from this side have either failed to give any direct reply to the question : What is virtue ? or else have answered it in a more or less eudaemonistic way. It was left for Kant, whose interest in the classics was for- tunately small, to strike out a new and better type of answer. But the Kantian influence, though great, has not been decisive. Moral idealism has not altogether fulfilled its early promise. Some of its forms, such as the intuitionism of the last generation, are more likely to repel than to convince the impartial student. And so the Summum Bonum doctrine, backed by the enormous force of its classical prestige, on the whole predominates among us. 21. There is another cause which has operated power- fully in modern days, and is well put by Bentham in the passages where he expresses his dislike of what he calls " ipsedixitism ". "The various systems that have been formed concerning the standard of right and wrong, may all be reduced to the principle of sympathy and antipathy. One account may serve for all of them. They consist all of them in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept of the author's sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself. The phrases different, but the principle the same." "One man says he has a thing made on pur- pose to tell him what is right and what is wrong ; and that it is called a moral sense ; and then he goes to work at his ease and says, ' Such a thing is right and such a thing is wrong why? Because my moral sense tells me it is.' Another man comes and alters the phrase, leaving out moral and putting in common in the room of it," etc. Bentham 1 Eth. Nic., 2, 2, 1.