370 j. H. MUIEHEAD:
sought at the expense of the community, as of the evils resulting from the gratification of merely personal desires. In chapter v. the same conclusion is brought home from the side of "Moral Ideals and Progress". As nothing is to be had for nothing, even the most successful effort after "self-realisation" must after all turn out to be a partial failure. On the other hand "social effort" necessarily involves "differential treatment"; the gain of one class the loss of another. Much, moreover, that goes by the name of progress is only apparent: human gain is animal loss; intellectual development, physical degeneration; improved conditions of life in one class, the exploitation of another. Even the moral gains of mercy, toleration, forgiveness mean a loss in courage, self-reliance, promptitude. Mr. Taylor does not assert on the ground of all this that moral progress is a delusion ("the voice of instructed mankind" declares against such a conclusion), but the signs of the times are not auspicious and we are left with the impression that this may be a prejudice.
So far as these conclusions are founded on empirical considerations we can hardly think them to have been satisfactory to Mr. Taylor himself. It would certainly be difficult to find support for them among expert writers on any of the subjects he mentions, industrial, ethical or educational. But the argument is fortified as we have seen by quite a different line of thought and in connexion with this raises a question of principle which is of fundamental philosophical importance.
Assuming it to be generally admitted among idealist writers (with whom as we have seen in spite of himself his argument allies the author) that morality falls short of the highest form of experience, as seems proved by the fact that its dialectic when followed as far as it can go leaves us at last face to face with contradiction, the question remains how far it carries us and how we are to conceive of its reality as affected by the fact that it cannot carry us to the end. Where Mr. Taylor departs from current idealism (unjustifiably we think) is first in finding contradiction and insolubility at the level of the individual and the social instead of at a point far beyond this popular antithesis; secondly (and partly as a consequence) in leaving us in obscurity as to the sense in which morality as commonly understood is real and valid at all.
From Plato downwards it has been the contention of idealism that beyond the antithesis of self and others a harmony is in principle attainable on the ethical level. In modern philosophy this point of view has been represented by Rousseau's General Will, Hegel's distinction between Moralität und Sittlichkeit, Green's Common Good and Mr. Bradley's Station and its Duties. The point at which morality shows itself to be relative and, judged by an absolute standard, unreal is not here but at the deeper level of the nature of the individual will itself. Mr. Taylor shows himself alive to the significance of this central conception of modern ethical theory in the later chapters, and it is the more surprising to find him labouring the lower contradiction in the
