ly
and peculiarly insensible, to many goods. As a militant, fighting
free-handed that the goods to which he is sensible may not be submerged
and lost from out of life, the philosopher, like every other human
being, is in a natural position. But think of Zeno and of Epicurus,
think of Calvin and of Paley, think of Kant and Schopenhauer, of
Herbert Spencer and John Henry Newman, no longer as one-sided champions
of special ideals, but as schoolmasters deciding what all must
think,--and what more grotesque topic could a satirist wish for on
which to exercise his pen? The fabled attempt of Mrs. Partington to
arrest the rising tide of the North Atlantic with her broom was a
reasonable spectacle compared with their effort to substitute the
content of their clean-shaven systems for that exuberant mass of goods
with which all human nature is in travail, and groaning to bring to the
light of day. Think, furthermore, of such individual moralists, no
longer as mere schoolmasters, but as pontiffs armed with the temporal
power, and having authority in every concrete case of conflict to order
which good shall be butchered and which shall be suffered to
survive,--and the notion really turns one pale. All one's slumbering
revolutionary instincts waken at the thought of any single moralist
wielding such powers of life and death. Better chaos forever than an
order based on any closet-philosopher's rule, even though he were the
most enlightened possible member of his tribe. No! if the philosopher
is to keep his judicial position, he must never become one of the
parties to the fray.

What can he do, then, it will now be asked, except to fall back on
scepticism and give up the notion of being a philosopher at all?

{205}

But do we not already see a perfectly definite path of escape which is
open to him just because he is a philosopher, and not the champion of
one particular ideal? Since everything which is demanded is by that
fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy
(since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world)
be simply to satisfy at all times _as many demands as we can_? That
act must be the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole,
in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions. In the
casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which
_prevail at the least cost_, or by whose realization the least possible
number of other ideal