ry because they refer to no 'external
standard.' His opponents, not he, really make morality arbitrary. This,
whatever the ultimate truth, is in fact the essential core of all the
Utilitarian doctrine descended from or related to Benthamism. Benthamism
aims at converting morality into a science. Science, according to him,
must rest upon facts. It must apply to real things, and to things which
have definite relations and a common measure. Now, if anything be real,
pains and pleasures are real. The expectation of pain or pleasure
determines conduct; and, if so, it must be the sole determinant of
conduct. The attempt to conceal or evade this truth is the fatal source
of all equivocation and confusion. Try the experiment. Introduce a
'moral sense.' What is its relation to the desire for happiness? If the
dictates of the moral sense be treated as ultimate, an absolutely
arbitrary element is introduced; and we have one of the 'innate ideas'
exploded by Locke, a belief summarily intruded into the system without
definite relations to any other beliefs: a dogmatic assertion which
refuses to be tested or to be correlated with other dogmas; a reduction
therefore of the whole system to chaos. It is at best an instinctive
belief which requires to be justified and corrected by reference to some
other criterion. Or resolve morality into 'reason,' that is, into some
purely logical truth, and it then remains in the air--a mere nonentity
until experience has supplied some material upon which it can work. Deny
the principle of utility, in short, as he says in a vigorous
passage,[364] and you are involved in a hopeless circle. Sooner or later
you appeal to an arbitrary and despotic principle and find that you have
substituted words for thoughts.

The only escape from this circle is the frank admission that happiness
is, in fact, the sole aim of man. There are, of course, different kinds
of happiness as there are different kinds of physical forces. But the
motives to action are, like the physical forces, commensurable. Two
courses of conduct can always be compared in respect of the happiness
produced, as two motions of a body can be compared in respect of the
energy expended. If, then, we take the moral judgment to be simply a
judgment of amounts of happiness, the whole theory can be systematised,
and its various theorems ranged under a single axiom or consistent set
of axioms. Pain and pleasure give the real value of actions; they are
the