theological. As to the political element, Plato
everywhere conceives the good as the eligible in life, and refers it
to human nature and to the pursuit of happiness--that happiness which
Mr. Russell, in a rash moment, says is but a name which some people
prefer to give to pleasure. Thus in the _Philebus_ (11, D) the good
looked for is declared to be "some state and disposition of the soul
which has the property of making all men happy"; and later (66, D) the
conclusion is that insight is better than pleasure "as an element in
human life." As to the theological element, Plato, in hypostasising
the good, does not hypostasise it as good, but as cause or power,
which is, it seems to me, the sole category that justifies hypostasis,
and logically involves it; for if things have a ground at all, that
ground must exist before them and beyond them. Hence the whole
Platonic and Christian scheme, in making the good independent of
private will and opinion, by no means makes it independent of the
direction of nature in general and of human nature in particular; for
all things have been created with an innate predisposition towards the
creative good, and are capable of finding happiness in nothing else.
Obligation, in this system, remains internal and vital. Plato
attributes a single vital direction and a single moral source to the
cosmos. This is what determines and narrows the scope of the true
good; for the true good is that relevant to nature. Plato would not
have been a dogmatic moralist, had he not been a theist.]

But perhaps what suggests this hypostasis of good is rather the fact
that what others find good, or what we ourselves have found good in
moods with which we retain no sympathy, is sometimes pronounced by us
to be bad; and far from inferring from this diversity of experience
that the present good, like the others, corresponds to a particular
attitude or interest of ours, and is dependent upon it, Mr. Russell
and Mr. Moore infer instead that the presence of the good must be
independent of all interests, attitudes, and opinions. They imagine
that the truth of a proposition attributing a certain relative quality
to an object contradicts the truth of another proposition, attributing
to the same object an opposite relative quality. Thus if a man here
and another man at the antipodes call opposite directions up, "only
one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is
right."

To protect the belated inn