thinker's judgments of good and ill
are true or not. Truth supposes a standard outside of the thinker to
which he must conform; but here the thinker is a sort of divinity,
subject to no higher judge. Let us call the supposed universe which he
inhabits a _moral solitude_. In such a moral solitude it is clear that
there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the
god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of his
own several ideals with one another. Some of these will no doubt be
more pungent and appealing than the rest, their goodness will have a
profounder, more penetrating taste; they will return to haunt him with
more obstinate regrets if violated. So the thinker will have to order
his life with them as its chief determinants, or else remain inwardly
discordant and unhappy. Into whatever equilibrium he may settle,
though, and however he may straighten out his system, it will be a
right system; for beyond the facts of his own subjectivity there is
nothing moral in the world.

If now we introduce a second thinker with his likes and dislikes into
the universe, the ethical situation becomes much more complex, and
several possibilities are immediately seen to obtain.

One of these is that the thinkers may ignore each other's attitude
about good and evil altogether, and each continue to indulge his own
preferences, indifferent to what the other may feel or do. In such a
{192} case we have a world with twice as much of the ethical quality in
it as our moral solitude, only it is without ethical unity. The same
object is good or bad there, according as you measure it by the view
which this one or that one of the thinkers takes. Nor can you find any
possible ground in such a world for saying that one thinker's opinion
is more correct than the other's, or that either has the truer moral
sense. Such a world, in short, is not a moral universe but a moral
dualism. Not only is there no single point of view within it from
which the values of things can be unequivocally judged, but there is
not even a demand for such a point of view, since the two thinkers are
supposed to be indifferent to each other's thoughts and acts. Multiply
the thinkers into a pluralism, and we find realized for us in the
ethical sphere something like that world which the antique sceptics
conceived of,--in which individual minds are the measures of all
things, and in which no one 'objective' truth, but only a mult