PROFESSOR GOLD WIN SMITH AS A CRITIC. 19 



Even without going further, it will, I think, be manifest enough that, 

 instead of putting pleasures and pains in the foreground, as alone to 

 be considered in determining right and wrong (which Professor Gold- 

 win Smith's account of my views will lead every reader to suppose I 

 do), I have here distinctly asserted the need for another method of 

 determining right and wrong. And if comparisons of pleasures and 

 pains, or estimations of happiness, are to be " entirely set aside " in 

 the guidance of " a large part of conduct," it will puzzle any reader to 

 conceive what such guidance can be if there are excluded from it all 

 ideas of principle, rectitude, duty, obligation. But now, remarking 

 this much, I go on to point out that a large part of the chapter is de- 

 voted to the refutation of Bentham's doctrine, that happiness is to be 

 the immediate object of pursuit. I have insisted on the authoritative 

 character of certain "regulative principles for the conduct of asso- 

 ciated human beings" (p. 167), which are already recognized and "es- 

 tablished," and have urged that conformity to these must be the direct 

 aim, and not happiness. Concerning certain moral ideas and senti- 

 ments, I have said : 



Are they supernaturally-caused modes of thinking and feeling, tending to 

 make men fulfill the conditions to happiness? If so, their authority is peremp- 

 tory. Are they modes of thinking and feeling naturally caused in men by ex- 

 perience of these conditions? If so, their authority is no less peremptory (p. 

 168). 



And then, having in various ways explained and enforced the need 

 for these "regulative principles," and the peremptory authority of 

 these " modes of thinking and feeling " known as conscience, I have 

 closed the chapter by saying that "conflicting ethical theories . . . 

 severally embody portions of the truth, and simply require combining 

 in proper order to embody the whole truth" (p. 171). 



The theological theory contains a part. If for the divine will, supposed to 

 be supernaturally revealed, we substitute the naturally-revealed end toward 

 which the power manifested throughout evolution works; then, since evolution 

 has been, and is still, working toward the highest life, it follows that conform- 

 ing to those principles by which the highest life is achieved is furthering that 

 end. The doctrine, that perfection or excellence of nature should be the object 

 of pursuit, is in one sense true, for it tacitly recognizes that ideal form of being 

 which the highest life implies, and to which evolution tends. There is a truth, 

 also, in the doctrine that virtue must be the aim, for this is another form of the 

 doctrine that, the aim must be to fulfill the conditions to achievement of the 

 highest life. That the intuitions of a moral faculty should guide our conduct is 

 a proposition in which a truth is contained, for these intuitions are the slowly 

 organized results of experiences received by the race while living in presence of 

 these conditions. And that happiness as the supreme end is beyond question 

 true, for this is the concomitant of that highest life which every theory of 

 moral guidance has distinctly or vaguely in view. 



So understanding their relative positions, those ethical systems which make 

 virtue, right, obligation the cardinal aims, are seen to be complementary to those 



