THE PROBLEM OF CONDUCT. 369 The difficulty here raised has to be faced more explicitly when we came to the question of the source of the appearance of absolute worth which attaches to qualities and actions approved by morality. This Mr. Taylor finds, in the first instance, in the comparative permanence and unconditionality of the pleasure or satisfaction they tend to secure. Character has greater worth than wealth or beauty, because the wants it satisfies more constantly recur and are more universally felt. But the question remains as to the source of this permanence and unconditionality, and as to the wants that are thus universal. Granted that you can speak of certain pleasures or satisfactions as permanent and unconditional (or as Plato would say ' real '), what is the ground of their com- parative reality ? Plato's answer, in spite of ambiguities, was that those satisfactions are real and permanent, which are a sign that the will has found realisation as a system of organised activities. In referring us to the standard of " the steady progressive satisfac- tion of an organised system of persistent wants " and again to " the formula in which an individual finds the most coherent and adequate account of his own most deeply rooted preferences" Mr. Taylor leaves it doubtful whether, in spite of the phenomenology of his preface, he does not arrive at a like idealistic conclusion. The next chapter on the " Types of Virtue " brings us to the main object of this part of the book, the empirical proof that " there is no self-consistent highest category under which all the various phe- nomena of the moral life can be satisfactorily grouped ". " As in the various theories by which we attempt to describe physical phe- nomena we find ourselves driven to assert now the complete inertia, now the spontaneous mobility of material elements, now the com- plete homogeneousness of an all-pervading ' ether,' and again the presence in it of an infinite number of differential motions ; now the instantaneous action of gravitation and again the dependence of all action upon a succession of impacts so in our descriptive analysis of the phenomena of the moral life we are compelled to regard now self-assertion, self-satisfaction, self -development, and again the satis- factions of a wider whole as the two equally ultimate but quite irreconcilable poles between which our ethical practice is perpetu- ally oscillating." The argument starts from the antithesis of the individual or intensive and the social or extensive Type of Virtue. Although as society progresses the paths of self-culture and of social duty seem to show a tendency to coincide, the coincidence can never be complete, for progress means the multiplication as well of the ways in which personal satisfaction may on occasion be History has made us familiar with a presentational, admitted even by its most distinguished representatives to be a merely provisional because ' falsified ' psychology ; recent discussions have familiarised us with a volitional or concrete psychology resting on the recognition of will and feeling as fundamental factors ; Mr. Taylor seems to adopt a com- promise between them, retaining presentation and feeling as primary while treating volition as secondary and derivative. 24
