his hinder parts," or as an earlier writer, using the same allusion to the fabled emergence of animals from the slime, more vigorously expressed it, "their hinder parts are yet plain mud."

Plato must not be classed with these. Although he does not treat Duty or the Right as a primary idea, and attempts to derive it from the idea of the good, yet it must be borne in mind that he regards the Good as including in itself the unity of the True and the Beautiful, and thus determines it by a rational standard. Hence with entire consistency he argues, as in the Philebus and the Gorgias, that enjoyment or pleasure does not constitute the Good. Plato's error is that he attempts to develop the idea of the Right from that of the Good instead of immediately recognizing truth as law to the will. This error has made his ethics indefinite, confused and vacillating.

In any correct idea of the good or well-being of man two elements must be recognized, enjoyment which we know by experience, and the standard of truth, right and perfection, which we know in the light of Reason.

II. The maxim of Hedonism that the one ultimate motive of all human action is the desire of happiness is contrary to fact. This is a sort of fundamental maxim with the advocates of this theory which they set forth as self-evident; "Happiness our being's end and aim." Bentham in the Deontology says: "No man ever had, can or could have a motive different from the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain." But this extravagant assertion is in direct contradiction to the most common and obvious facts of human nature.

1. Every appetite, desire, affection or motive of whatever kind has its own specific object, and is not resolvable into the desire of happiness; this desire for the object is prerequisite to the possibility of finding enjoyment in the object. Hunger, for example, is the appetite for food, not the desire for happiness. When I have no appetite for food I have no pleasure in eating. My desire of happiness is as strong as ever. Why then do I not eat? What has changed? Not my desire of happiness, but my appetite for food. The same is true of all the sensibilities which are motives to action. Each has its own peculiar object; that peculiar object alone and no other can satisfy it; when a child is hungry its hunger cannot be appeased with a rattle.

2. Hence the motives to human action are many, not one alone. They who believe that man's good or well-being consists only in enjoyments distinguishable only in degree, reduce human nature to a dreary monotony, moved always by one and the same impulse, the desire of happiness. On the contrary the motives of human action are of many kinds :-appetites, desires, affections, affinities, antipathies, preferences, instinctive and rational, constitutional and acquired, involuntary and

voluntary, and each kind including many particular motives, each impelling to some peculiar object of its own. Herein consists the manysidedness of man, his susceptibility to a great variety of impressions and influences, and his capacity for a complex and many-sided development and a complex and many-sided civilization.

3. It should also be noticed that any one of these appetites, desires or affections, by transient excitement or confirmed habit, may gain ascendancy and lead to sacrifice the objects of every other desire. A drunkard sacrifices health, property and reputation for drink. A miser sacrifices every comfort of life that he may hoard. Louise Michell, tried for participation in the crimes of the commune in Paris, gloried before her judges in the atrocities which she had committed and challenged them to put her to death. "What I ask of you," she cried, " is a place on the field of Satory by the side of our dear condemned brother. If you do not shoot me you are a pack of cowards." "In delivering these words," we are told in a narrative of the trial, ❝her whole figure shook with passion, her voice rang forth like a trumpet, and she looked the very image of an inspired fury." Louise was an atheist; she had no expectation of happiness after the fatal shot; she was ready to sacrifice life and all possibilities of pleasure in her fury against society. Her fury had wrapt her whole being in its blaze, licking up with its tongues of fire every other passion and interest as fuel. Similar are the stories of Charlotte Corday who murdered Marat, and of the Russian Nihilists. And yet we are asked to believe that all these devoted themselves to death in the commission of these crimes solely from the desire of happiness.

The desire of happiness is one among the many motives of human action. No man can prefer pain to pleasure, if pain and pleasure are the only objects compared. If he accepts pain in any case it is because he yields to some other motive. It is contrary to the most obvious and familiar facts of psychology to affirm that the desire of happiness is the one only ultimate motive of human action.

4. This reduction of all human action to one motive is incompatible with free-will. If man is constituted with susceptibility to only one motive, he has no power of free choice. He must follow that one impulse as necessarily as a brute follows the strongest impulse of his nature. Free choice is determination between different objects to which we are impelled by different motives.

5. The Hedonistic maxim is also incompatible with the fact that happiness has no fixed dependence on outward objects, but is relative to and dependent on the subjective state of the man himself. We do not desire any object because it imparts happiness; but the object imparts happiness because we desire it.

The Hedonist may reply to the arguments which I have been presenting that he does not mean that happiness is the only motive of human action, but that it is the ultimate motive; we admit, he may say, that every feeling which moves man to action has its peculiar and specific object, and that thus man is influenced by many motives; but we affirm that in all these the ultimate motive is the enjoyment which is to result. The point which I now make is that the Hedonistic maxim as thus explained is still in direct contradiction to obvious and fundamental facts in the constitution and action of man. For the happiness does not exist as an antecedent objective reality, but is itself the result of the man's own desire or choice of the object. Happiness is the smile that beams on the gratification of desire. As a man is not happy in order to smile, but smiles because he is happy already, so a man does not desire and choose an object in order to be happy; but he is happy in the object because he desires and chooses it.

Happiness is not bottled up in outward things, so much happiness in a house and grounds, so much in horses and equipage, and whoever gets the object gets the same definite amount of enjoyment. But whether a person finds any enjoyment whatever in an object depends on the state of his own heart towards it.

Hence every new affection opens a new source of enjoyment. Here is a young man whose present enjoyment consists in spending his earnings in clothing, horses and the like. By and by the love of wife and children is in his heart, and that new love has opened to him new motives of action, new objects of interest, new sources of enjoyment, a new world in which to expatiate. He is born again into a new life. Or he travels and becomes interested in art; he studies botany and becomes interested in plants, or geology and becomes interested in the structure of the earth; or he identifies himself with some moral reform or some political party; and each new motive opens a new world of joy, a spring of living water flowing out of the man and clothing with verdure and fertility what to him had been a desert.

And in many cases of this kind, what, after the new love has sprung up, is a source of joy, had been before disgusting; a boy who hates to study may become afterwards a lover of learning; a debauchee, to whom a sober and religious life is repulsive, may come to love God, to rejoice in sobriety, purity, beneficence and devotion, while his former debauchery in its turn becomes disgusting. As Paul describes his own. experience in his conversion, what he had regarded as loss became gain, and what he had regarded as gain became loss.

Evidently in these cases it is not the enjoyment which kindles the desire or affection or choice, but the desire, affection or choice which

kindles the enjoyment. Happiness, therefore, cannot be the ultimate motive of all action.*

III. The Hedonistic maxim that all pleasures are of the same kind and equal worth, and are distinguishable only by their degree of intensity, continuity and duration, is contrary to the facts of human nature and action.

1. Since happiness does not exist in objective reality, but is wholly relative to and dependent on the subjective state of the person, enjoy. ments must be discriminated from each other and cannot be grouped together as of the same kind.

They must be distinguished by their subjective sources. The enjoy ments arising from gluttony, drunkenness and licentiousness are not the same in kind with those arising from intellectual discovery, virtuous character and the achievements of Christian beneficence. The joys of sin are not like the joys of holiness. The joy of communing with a harlot is not the same with the joy of communing with God. The joy of miserliness is not the same with the joy of beneficence. It would be impossible to convince a converted debauchee that the pleasures of his debauchery, the remembrance of which fills him with shuddering and disgust, were the same in kind with the pleasures of his present sobriety, industry and piety.

The

Pleasures are also discriminated by their tendency. They are motives. The drunkard's enjoyments are a stimulus to new excesses. sinner's pleasure in sin impels him on in sinning. By his own preference and choice he gravitates downward; he finds his happiness in sin; he regards it as his good; he thinks it impossible to enjoy a life of virtue

* Pres. Edwards says: "Some say that all love arises or self-love; and that it is impossible in the nature of things for any man to have any love to God or any other being but that love to himself must be the foundation of it. But I humbly suppose

that it is for want of consideration that they say so. They argue that whoever loves God and so desires his glory or the enjoyment of him, desires these things as his own happiness. The glory of God and the beholding and enjoying his perfections are considered as things agreeable to him, tending to make him happy. And so they say it is through self-love or a desire of his own happiness that he desires God should be glorified and desires to behold and enjoy his glorious perfections. There is no doubt that after God's glory and beholding his perfections are become so agreeable to him, he will desire them as his own happiness. But how came these things to be so agreeable to him that he esteems it his highest happiness to glorify God? Is not this the fruit of love? Must not a man first love God and have his heart united to him, before he will esteem God's good his own, and before he will desire the glorifying of God as his own happiness? It is not strong arguing that, because after a man has his heart united to God in love and, as a fruit of this, desires God's glory as his own happiness, therefore a desire of his own happiness must needs be the cause and foundation of his love; unless it be strong reasoning that because a father begat a son, therefore his son certainly begat him."

and godliness. He "cannot see the kingdom of heaven." With his eager joy in sin he stoops downward as he runs and his "steps take hold on hell." But the Christian's joy is an impulse to Christian service, an inspiration for good, a strengthening of faith and love; it gives wings to bear him nearer to God.

2. Enjoyments are not essentially good, but may be evil. That a person is happy is no proof of his well-being.

Because they are inseparable from the subjective state of the person, enjoyments cannot of themselves alone constitute the good or well-being of a man. The character of the person which makes the enjoyment possible must be an element in the good. As Tennyson says, "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." When a man enjoys to-day what disgusts him to-morrow, when one enjoys what disgusts another, these joys cannot be alike and indiscriminately the good or well-being of man.

Pleasure therefore may be evil and not good. The pleasure which breathes from an evil character and which would give place to sorrow if the character were good, cannot be good, but must itself be evil. The pleasure which impels the sinner to more wickedness, which precludes the capacity of joy in right living, which the sinner chooses as his good and so brings on himself the woe pronounced on those who call evil good and good evil, this pleasure is not good, but evil. The sinner finding his enjoyment in this may fitly exclaim with Milton's Satan,

"All good to me is lost; evil be thou my good."

The worst evil of sin is the joy which the sinner feels in it. 3. Enjoyments must also be distinguished as to their essential worth. Man is a rational being. In the normal development of his constitution he has the fundamental ideas of reason, Truth, Law and Perfection. Any theory of human life which ignores this great fact must be fundamentally wrong. It is only by rigidly excluding all cognizance of this fact that it is possible to regard all pleasure as of the same quality, dignity and worth.

4. Accordingly the common sense of mankind rejects the doctrine. It is impossible to attach the same quality, dignity and worth to the pleasure of a pig with one foot in the trough, and the joy of Archimedes shouting Eureka, at a discovery of the method of ascertaining specific gravity; to the maudlin happiness of a drunken man and the solemn ecstasy of Kepler, when he exclaimed, "Oh, God, I read thy thoughts after thee;" to the joy of a pinched and skinny miser and the enthusiasm of a Raphael putting the creations of his genius on the canvas; to the devilish glee of Nero in his atrocities and the