possessed the moral insight, what would this insight then lead them to do? Here the hedonist will expect to have his revenge for our previous neglect of his advice. “My precepts have been set aside so far,” he may say, “as having no immediate application to the moral needs of the moment. To get this merely formal condition of harmony among men, the moral man has been advised to subordinate all direct efforts towards making people happy, to the end of making them first possess what you have called the moral mood. But now at last, in the supposed case, the great end has been attained, and men are formally moral. Now surely they have nothing to do but to be as happy as possible. So at last my plan will be vindicated, and the ideal man will come to be a seeker of ideal pleasures.”
The hedonist is too sanguine. His ideas of the highest state may have their value, but they are indefinite in at least one respect. When he says that he wants all his ideal men, in the ideal state, to be happy together, he never tells us what he means by the individual man at all, nor what inner relation that individual’s happiness is to have to the happiness of other men. All men, in the ideal state, are to be harmonious and happy together: this the hedonist tells us; but he does not see how many difficulties are involved in the definition of this ideal state. He plainly means and says that in this ideal state the good of the wiiole society is to be an aggregate of a great number of individual happy states, which the various men of the blessed society are to feel. He assumes then that in the ideal state each
