6 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



terns whatsoever well-being ; and it considers conduct in its di- 

 rect or indirect relation to that end that is, in the connection of 

 actions immediately with well-being, or mediately with the con- 

 ditions prerequisite to its attainment. Its fundamental assump- 

 tions are therefore at once simple, and, despite all doctririaire theo- 

 rizing to the contrary, practically though latently universal. We 

 are alive. This is obviously for all of us the final fact, and no 

 less obviously every proposed test of life's activities must ulti- 

 mately be resolved into terms of this unresolvable first principle. 

 Now, the facts of actual life favor neither the fatuous preconcep- 

 tions of the optimist nor the equally wild asseverations of the 

 pessimist. We can not assert, with Malebranche and Leibnitz, 

 that this is the best of all possible worlds ; or with Hartley, that 

 "all individuals are actually and always infinitely happy" a 

 proposition which, as Mr. Leslie Stephen has well said, sounds like 

 optimism run mad. But neither, on the other hand, can we ac- 

 cept the dogma of Chabot, that what we mistakenly call the cos- 

 mos is really the work of a crazy devil; or follow Schopeuhauer 

 in his statement that the universe is just as bad as it conceivably 

 could be without falling to pieces altogether ; or treat seriously 

 the suggestion of Novalis, that the simultaneous suicide of all 

 human creatures is the one way of escape from miseries that are 

 both unbearable and irremediable. Optimism would logically 

 negative any attempt to tamper with the facts of a world where- 

 in it has already pertly concluded that whatever is is right ; pes- 

 simism no less inevitably leads to a like passivity by treating life 

 in its essence as radically too evil a thing to be susceptible of any 

 improvement. But life, as I have said, fits the theories of neither 

 pessimist nor optimist. It is not wholly bad, it is not wholly 

 good ; it is a thing of mingled yarn, good and ill together, with 

 immeasurable capacity, in its higher forms especially, for the de- 

 velopment of one element or the other. Moral conduct I there- 

 fore conceive to be, in a single phrase, conduct which betters exist- 

 ence, which adds to its sum total of happiness or decreases its sum 

 total of pain. Action which makes life as a whole more fully 

 worth living is as such right action ; action which diminishes its 

 value is as such wrong. The results upon which morality thus 

 bases its incentives and restraints are therefore the actual results 

 involved in the very constitution of things and not consequences 

 artificially imposed by any external power. We reach in this 

 way the ultimate conception of the immanent moral law, and for 

 myself I see no way either of avoiding the resolution of all other 

 possible criteria of conduct into the criterion thus established, or 

 of getting behind such a standard in search of a final principle 

 of a more universal, fundamental, and axiomatic character. Here, 

 and here alone, it seems to me, we strike bed-rock. 



