that in my view human life as it exists is not only better but happier than he would make it" (p. 34). This seems to me an interesting and valuable piece of criticism. Mr. Mill's attempt to base the superiority of the higher class of pleasures upon simple experience is subjected to a keen analysis. "It is an unquestionable fact," says Mr. Mill, "that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties." To call some faculties "higher," Mr. Grote argues, implies of itself that they are worthier to be employed, and is sufficient to determine action. But it might be answered that "higher" is used à posteriori, to describe the faculties of which the employment is found by comparative experience to yield the more pleasure. With more effect he remarks that, in taking the judgment of those who have tried, and are capable of appreciating different sorts of pleasures, we are bringing in an element-capability of appreciation which does not belong to the simple experience of pleasure and pain. We say that we ought to pursue that kind of happiness which is valued by the worthiest. He shows also that pleasure and pain are so little separable from the whole state of mind of the enjoying or suffering person, that a man whose existing character disposes him to enjoy one kind of pleasure is not a fair judge of the comparative enjoyability of another kind, although he himself, in a different state of mind, experienced it. "As a matter of fact we do not look upon pleasures as independent things to be thus compared with each other, but as interwoven with the rest of life, as having their history and their reasons, as involving different kinds of enjoyment in such a manner that our being able to enter into one kind is accompanied with a horror of another kind, which would entirely prevent the comparison of the one with the other as pleasures. Besides this, it must be remembered that, in the interval between the one pleasure and the other, the mind itself is changed: you have no permanent touchstone, no currency to be the medium of the comparison. Supposing a man whose youth has been grossly vicious, whose mature age is most deeply devout: most commonly I think the man will wonder that he was ever able to find pleasure at all in what he once found pleasure in. Earnestness in the later frame of mind, whatever it is, would only preclude the possibility of a cool comparison of it, as to pleasure, with the earlier one" (p. 54). "Pleasure will not bear to be looked too straight at, to be made too much, itself, the object and centre of view." "I do not think that any person who considers really what life is, while undoubtedly he acknowledges that comparability among different sorts of pleasure, as pleasure, is to a certain extent real and what we act upon, will

ever imagine that it can be to us a moral guide, or a basis for moral philosophy." "I cannot understand a general scale of pleasures, in which so many marks will be given to drunkenness, so many to love of the fine arts, so many to something else, according to the experience of those who have tried more than one of them" (p. 55).

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2. But, in Mr. Mill's creed, it is not their tendency to produce happiness simply, but their tendency to produce social or general happiness, that determines the rightness of actions. The adjective social, in Mr. Grote's opinion, really transforms the old happiness theory, instead of merely developing it. He points out something very like a fallacy in Mr. Mill's attempt to found the pursuit of social good on the natural desire of happiness. "Each person's happiness,' says Mr. Mill, 'is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons.' are talking here of a good' as an 'end of action:' let us substitute the equivalent term, and the argument then will be, that as each man's happiness is 'the end of action' to him, so the general happiness is 'the end of action' to the aggregate. Except so far as the aggregate' can act, this latter clause is unmeaning. But Mr. Mill seems to consider that he has proved that, in the same natural manner in which a man's happiness is an end to him, the aggregate happiness is an end to each individual of the aggregate. Mr. Mill in other places, as we have seen, shows most admirably how it may become so but if his proof here had held good, there would have been no need to show this; what I have called his Societarianism' would have been superfluous." The real point of morals, which Utilitarianism evades, is the knowing how to meet any one who concludes thus, Since then it is my happiness that is the good to me, it is not the general happiness that is so, and there is no reason that I at least should act for that. The more a man's particular happiness appears a good to him, the more it is likely to engross his action, and the less he is likely to think of the happiness of the aggregate' (pp. 70, 72).

If happiness, in the bulk, were like a central body towards which human effort naturally gravitated-if it were as natural to me to seek some else's happiness as my own, simply through the attraction which happiness exercises upon my instincts,-then Mr. Mill's Neo-Utilitarian theory would seem to be well based and consistent. But it is not clear why the simple natural craving of each man for his own happiness, no other element which might determine conduct being imported, should be supposed to bind or to lead each man to prefer the general happiness to his own. Mr. Mill emphatically holds such preference to be right. His words can never be too often quoted: "The happiness which forms the Utilitarian standard of

what is right in conduct is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, Utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator;""it is noble to be capable of resigning entirely one's own portion of happiness or chances of it." There could not be a higher or more exacting ethical doctrine. But does it quite legitimately spring from the observation that nature teaches every man to seek his own happiness? Mr. Mill brings in, as a fact of experience, the multiform operation of the social instincts: "The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that, except in some unusual circumstances, or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body." No doubt this is a fact, and a fact of experience. Instead of questioning the importance of it, we ask whether it is not too important for a secondary place in the Neo-Utilitarian theory; whether the account of virtue and duty given by this theory is not based much more on the bond which unites men in society than on the acknowledged desire of each man for his own happiness. Men become conscious of relations to their fellows; the binding force of these relations grows with life and civilization; men thus feel themselves constrained to prefer the social good to their own. Is not the social bond the more important part

The ideal,

of the foundation of Mr. Mill's ethics? Has not the Stoical or Christian cuckoo extruded the Epicurean sparrow? though you drive it out with a fork, will insist on returning. 3. According to Utilitarianism, tendency to produce happiness is the sole criterion of the morality of an action. Therefore, it may be inferred, a man's actions are to be determined by intention to produce happiness. Professor Grote assumes that the latter proposition is equivalent to the former; and he presses the question, Whose happiness? both in other parts of his work, and especially in a chapter on "the distribution of action for happiness."

Perhaps, however, it ought not to be assumed that those two propositions are equivalent. Whether a certain kind of action is right or not, is to be settled by its bearing, to be ascertained by experience and observation, upon universal happiness. But when it has been concluded on such grounds that a certain action is right, its rightness is a law, on Utilitarian principles, to the individual agent. He is not bound or expected to have the results of the action consciously in view. I think that the remembrance of this distinction between the morality of an action and the purpose of the agent will neutralize some part of Mr. Grote's criticism. If a man is asked, “Why do you care more for your child's happiness than for that of some other human being who has no tie to you?" he

may answer, "Because it is natural and right that I should; and it is right, because experience proves that the peculiar devotion of parents to their children's good is for the general advantage." At the same time it seems to me open to question whether the Benthamite calculations which Mr. Mill persists in affirming to be the foundations of morals, are really the natural and scientific basis of the superstructure which he rears upon them.

Mr. Mill writes as follows: "The Greatest-Happiness Principle is a mere form of words without rational signification, unless one person's happiness, supposed equal in degree (with the proper allowance made for kind), is counted for exactly as much as another's. These conditions being supplied, Bentham's dictum, 'everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one,' might be written under the principle of utility as an explanatory commentary." Mr. Herbert Spencer had remarked on this dictum, that "the principle of utility presupposes the anterior principle, that everybody has an equal right to happiness." "It may be more correctly described," answers Mr. Mill, "as supposing that equal amounts of happiness are equally desirable, whether felt by the same or by different persons. This, however, is not a pre-supposition; not a premise needful to support the principle of utility, but the very principle itself; for what is the principle of utility, if it be not that happiness' and 'desirable' are synonymous terms? If there is any anterior principle implied, it can be no other than this, that the truths of arithmetic are applicable to the valuation of happiness, as of all other measurable quantities." (Page 93, 2nd Ed.) But is this principle, that equal amounts of happiness are equally desirable, whether felt by the same or by different persons, all that is meant by the dictum, "everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one?" This dictum sounds like a generous assertion of equal rights; but it has no longer any such attractiveness, if it means, for example, this, "Provided I can more than double my own happiness, I shall do this, rather than try to give only an equal amount to another." Hypothetical cases, which do not correspond to actual facts, are often misleading; but in dealing with an arithmetical philosophy, arithmetical cases are not illegitimate tests. Suppose then only two persons, say Adam and Eve, alive in the world together. Imagine Adam to be thoroughly possessed by Utilitarian first principles. He would repeat to himself, "Equal amounts of happiness are equally desirable. Eve's happiness is as valuable as mine; also, mine is as valuable as Eve's. If it is in my power to add rather more to my own happiness than with the same effort I can add to hers, Eve has no claim whatever upon me. larger amount of happiness is more desirable than a smaller." But

A

what, in this surely supposable case, becomes of the self-renunciation which Utilitarianism applauds ?

Mr. Mill, it has been seen, remarks that the principle "that everybody has an equal right to happiness may be more correctly described as supposing that equal amounts of happiness are equally desirable, whether felt by the same or by different persons." Yet he himself deliberately uses on the same page the less correct form of expression, "The equal claim of everybody to happiness, in the estimation of the moralist and the legislator, involves an equal claim to all the means of happiness." Mr. Mill grows warm in the assertion of equal rights, and then he affirms that the great moral duty of treating all equally "rests on a still deeper foundation, being a direct emanation from the first principle of morals." This first principle is the arithmetical valuation of amounts of happiness. But in such valuation of happiness, as Mr. Mill himself plainly states, it makes no difference whether the happiness is felt by the same or by different persons. Therefore there is no equal claim of everybody to happiness involved in the mere addition and subtraction of amounts of happiness. Enthusiasm for social justice is not to be derived from the simple arithmetic of happiness, disengaged from every other principle.

Mr. Grote, assuming that in the application of its fundamental principle Utilitarianism would teach a man to aim at giving equal happiness to all, points out the extreme unnaturalness of such impartiality. No one would tolerate such a precept as "love your father and your neighbour, your benefactor and your neighbour, alike: " "yet this is in fact what the principle of everybody counting for one' leads to" (p. 95). It is difficult to say how far such criticism touches Mr. Mill. On the one hand, he warns us distinctly that that principle is limited by the inevitable conditions of human life, and by considerations of social expediency; and both life and the common interest constrain a man to love his father more than a stranger. On the other hand, Mr. Mill's creed seems to look upon preferences with disfavour, as tolerated exceptions rather than as growing out of the fundamental idea, as enclaves in the territory of the greatesthappiness principle, which must be watched with jealousy. But, if we take Mr. Mill's interpretation of the equality of persons as being properly the equality of equal amounts of happiness, we might invoke this principle in aid, not of an unnatural impartiality, but of those preferences which nature so strongly sanctions. For surely a man might argue with himself in this way, " Placed in the relation in which I am to my wife, I am much more able to give three times a of happiness to her than to give a to three strangers apiece. Therefore my wife has the stronger claim to happiness at my hands." Most persons, however, would feel that if the primary and derivative