certain unique predicate can be directly seen to belong to pleasure alone among existents: they do not emphasise, as they could hardly have failed to have done had they perceived it, how utterly independent of all other truths this truth must be.
Moreover it is easy to see how this unique position should have been assigned to pleasure without any clear consciousness of the assumption involved. Hedonism is, for a sufficiently obvious reason, the first conclusion at which any one who begins to reflect upon Ethics naturally arrives. It is very easy to notice the fact that we are pleased with things. The things we enjoy and the things we do not, form two unmistakable classes, to which our attention is constantly directed. But it is comparatively difficult to distinguish the fact that we approve a thing from the fact that we are pleased with it. Although, if we look at the two states of mind, we must see that they are different, even though they generally go together, it is very difficult to see in what respect they are different, or that the difference can in any connection be of more importance than the many other differences, which are so patent and yet so difficult to analyse, between one kind of enjoyment and another. It is very difficult to see that by ‘approving’ of a thing we mean feeling that it has a certain predicate—the predicate, namely, which defines the peculiar sphere of Ethics; whereas in the enjoyment of a thing no such unique object of thought is involved. Nothing is more natural than the vulgar mistake, which we find expressed in a recent book on Ethics[1]: ‘The primary ethical fact is, we have said, that something is approved or disapproved: that is, in other words, the ideal representation of certain events in the way of sensation, perception, or idea, is attended with a feeling of pleasure or of pain.’ In ordinary speech, ‘I want this,’ ‘I like this,’ ‘I care about this,’ are constantly used as equivalents for ‘I think this good.’ And in this way it is very natural to be led to suppose that there is no distinct class of ethical judgments, but only the class ‘things enjoyed’; in spite of the fact, which is very clear, if not very common, that we do not always approve what we enjoy. It is
- ↑ A. E. Taylor’s Problem of Conduct, p. 120.
