EEPLY TO ME. MUIRHEAD's CRITICISM. 377 business or profession, he may ultimately become a burden upon others ; hence had he paid more attention to his egoistic prompt- ings, he would have acted in the long run much more altruistically. From Mr. Muirhead's allusion to the great mass of mankind, one might suppose that the average man was a glutton, a drunkard, a sensualist, heartless and cruel. Fortunately we know that to describe him thus would be gross exaggeration. But allowing that he does unduly gratify the more animal and self-seeking desires and present inclinations in proportion to his fulfilment of the claims of the assthetic, intellectual, duty-regarding and bene- volent parts of his nature, a clear, full and forcible demonstration of the hedonic advantage of giving more heed to the latter would unquestionably have greater effect than vague allusions to an un- defined, indefinable, or never clearly defined ideal that has no relation to " agreeable consciousness ". Whatever gratification or development of the "higher" tendencies and desires cannot be shown to be hedonically approvable that is from the standpoint of universalistic hedonism could not justly be advocated by the hedonist. As to the extent to which a man may be induced to develop his intellectual and what may be called his more aesthetically and altruistically emotional nature, it depends, of course, upon his inherited endowment, his education and his surroundings, and no ethical demonstrator could do more than a certain amount : he cannot pretend to be a worker of miracles. What I have already said is sufficient answer to the first half of the succeeding paragraph, so I pass on to the second half. Ke- ferring to Mill's distinction of quality in pleasures, Mr. Muir- head supposes him to say : " This conduct cannot be shown to produce more pleasure than that, but it is higher". To put the above sentence into Mill's mouth is not, I hold, justified by the gist of his remarks in the Utilitarianism. Talking of those who prefer pleasures that " employ their higher faculties," Mill observes : " Whoever supposes that this preference takes place at a sacrifice of happiness that the superior being in anything like equal circumstances is not happier than the inferior confounds the very different ideas of happiness and content ". In my view, however, if Mill had considered the choice of " higher pleasures " in a less restricted sense, that is to say not merely with regard to the chooser of the pleasures, but how his choice may affect others, their hedonic desirability could have been much more readily demonstrated. In the last paragraph it is argued that Idealism " proposes a definition of social good which reconciles " " the claims of self and others ". As the allusions in these remarks to an ideal of life, on behalf of which the above plea is advanced, give no indication of what it actually means, one could not well say if it does or does not reconcile conflicting claims, or anything else. But this I do know, that so far as we can catch the meaning of Idealists in their references to self-abnegation and the realisation of the social
