:24]

The escape from this torture and self-deception is possible through the
same mystical experience, the same blending with the universe that
conditions knowledge.

[Sidenote: The Ethics of Welfare.]

Sect. 144. But though pleasant dreaming be the most consistent practical
sequel to a subjectivistic epistemology, its _individualism_ presents
another basis for life with quite different possibilities of emphasis.
It may develop into an aggressive egoism of the type represented by the
sophist Thrasymachus, in his proclamation that "might is right, justice
the interest of the stronger."[301:25] But more commonly it is tempered
by a conception of social interest, and serves as the champion of action
against contemplation. The gospel of action is always individualistic.
It requires of the individual a sense of his independence, and of the
real virtue of his initiative. Hence those voluntarists who emphasize
the many individual wills and decline to reduce them, after the manner
of Schopenhauer, to a universal, may be said to afford a direct
justification of it. It is true that this practical realism threatens
the tenability of an epistemological idealism, but the two have been
united, and because of their common emphasis upon the individual such
procedure is not entirely inconsequential. Friedrich Paulsen, whose
panpsychism has already been cited, is an excellent case in point. The
only good, he maintains, is "welfare," the fulfilment of those natural
desires which both distinguish the individual and signify his
continuity with all grades of being.

"The goal at which the will aims does not consist in a maximum
of pleasurable feelings, but in the normal exercise of the
vital functions for which the species is predisposed. In the
case of man the mode of life is on the whole determined by the
nature of the historical unity from which the individual
evolves as a member. Here the objective content of life, after
which the will strives, also enters into consciousness with
the progressive evolution of presentation; the type of life
becomes a conscious ideal of life."[302:26]

Here, contrary to the teaching of Schopenhauer, the good consists in
individual attainment, the extension and fulfilment of the _distinct_
interests that arise from the common fund of nature. To be and to do to
the uttermost, to realize the maximum from nature's investment in one's
special capacities and pow