why
should Bradley, or any idealist, have pursued ethical studies at all?
Since all phases of life were equally necessary to enrich an infinite
consciousness, which must know both good and evil in order to merge and to
transcend them, he could hardly nurse any intense enthusiasm for a
different complexion to be given to the lives of men. His moral
passion--for he had it, caustic and burning clear--was purely
intellectual: it was shame that in England the moral consciousness should
have been expressed in systems dialectically so primitive as those of the
positivists and utilitarians. He acknowledged, somewhat superciliously,
that their hearts were in the right place; yet, if we are to have ethics
at all, were not their thoughts in the right place also? They were
concerned not with analysis of the moral consciousness but with the
conduct of affairs and the reform of institutions. The spectacle of human
wretchedness profoundly moved them; their minds were bent on transforming
society, so that a man's station and its duties might cease to be what a
decayed feudal organisation and an inhuman industrialism had made of them.
They revolted against the miserable condition of the masses of mankind,
and against the miserable consolations which official religion, or a
philosophy like Bradley's, offered them in their misery. The utilitarians
were at least intent on existence and on the course of events; they wished
to transform institutions to fit human nature better, and to educate human
nature by those new institutions so that it might better realise its
latent capacities. These are matters which a man may modify by his acts
and they are therefore the proper concern of the moralist. Were they much
to blame if they neglected to define pleasure or happiness and used
catch-words, dialectically vague, to indicate a direction of effort
politically quite unmistakable? Doubtless their political action, like
their philosophical nomenclature, was revolutionary and relied too much on
wayward feelings ignorant of their own causes. Revolution, no less than
tradition, is but a casual and clumsy expression of human nature in
contact with circumstances; yet pain and pleasure and spontaneous hopes,
however foolish, are direct expressions of that contact, and speak for the
soul; whereas a man's station and its duties are purely conventional, and
may altogether misrepresent his native capacities. The protest of human
nature against the world and its