Page:Philosophical Review Volume 18.djvu/237

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223
REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
[Vol. XVIII.

fashion to select the principle which "seems most useful in conducting inquiry," warning us at the same time against the danger of "undue simplification." The three fundamental types of Moral Theory selected are those of the division into (1) Teleological and Jural, (2) Individual and Institutional, (3) Empirical and Intuitional. The first of these is (by a play of subtilty) immediately treated of as the division of Voluntary Activity into Inner and Outer, into the "What" and the "How" of moral action of Part I, and after much skilful argumentation in which the pros and the cons of the "consequence" and the "attitude" ways of judging of morality are set forth, along with the extent to which these two points of view cross and must cross in actual life, we learn that the "great need of the moral agent is thus a character which will make him as open as possible to the recognition of the consequences of his behavior," and that, consequently, the "appropriate" subject-matter of the moral judgment [obviously another "most useful" principle for conducting inquiry] is the "disposition of the person as manifested in the tendencies which cause certain consequences rather than others to be considered and esteemed."

The second main inquiry of this Part II—But what is the Good by which we thus determine consequences [an inquiry that is evidently, with Professor Dewey's characteristic subtilty, put forward as an equivalent of the second of the above-mentioned three types of ethical theory],—is now taken up. The entire inquiry is indeed a fine piece of sustained, concrete, philosophical reflection, throwing much fresh interest into the old hackneyed controversies of my 'good' and my 'pleasure' and my 'desires' [the 'Individual,' I take it] and the good of all ('Institutional'?) and the 'objective conditions' of happiness and endeavor. And it reposes in an illuminating way upon the idea or the result already reached of a correspondence or a harmony between good in intention and good in result,—a correspondence, by the way, that of itself tends to bridge the old hiatus between individual desire and common good. "There is no difference (such as early Utilitarianism made) between good as standard and good as aim, because only a voluntary preference for and interest in a social good is capable, otherwise than by coincidence or accident, of producing acts which have common good as their result." And as for the result in general of this examination of the Good as Happiness, the harmony reached by the book between happiness or pleasure as subjectively desired by the individual and happiness as an objective thing or good, is worded as follows: "Happiness consists in the agreement whether