86 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts, and Letters. 



supreme end, highest good, or rightful ultimate aim ? The 

 question once asked by classic philosophy, concerning the Sum- 

 mum Bonum,'has been reiterated by Christian theologians in the 

 form of " What is the chief end of man," but modern moralists 

 have not agreed upon an answer. If they had, they conld 

 easily have been unanimous about the true moral standard. 

 Given the supreme end, this standard is found in the fact that 

 ■whatever tends towards the supreme end is right, and every- 

 thing else wrong in proportion to the degree of obliquity. The 

 true moral test is that of direction towards the highest good. 

 We must locate this pole in ethics before we make a compass. 

 Modern philosophers generally make the compass first, and try 

 to find a pole afterwards, so that we have some dozen com- 

 passes pointing all sorts of ways. 



One of the oldest and most popular ethical systems, how- 

 ever, owes its commanding influence to its persistent attempt 

 to identify the moral standard with the supreme end. This pe- 

 culiarity has won the co-operation of such keen philosophers 

 as Epicurus, Pliny, Gassendi, Hume, Locke, Bentham, Mackin- 

 tosh and Mill, to which great names might be added those of 

 Lucretius, Horace, Lucian, Moliere, Rochefoucauld, VoltuirC; 

 Franklin and Lincoln. Rapid progress is being made in this 

 country, as well as in Europe, by this system, which, asserting 

 the supreme end to be Universal Happiness, pronounces all 

 actions right or wrong, according to their tendency to increase 

 or diminish the greatest good of the greatest number. Such at 

 least is the utilitarian formula, which, however, takes an un- 

 fair advantage of the fact that the word " good" has two senses, 

 sufficiently distinguished in common use, and means some- 

 times pleasant or productive of happiness, and sometimes obli- 

 gatory or obedient to the moral law. The term good may de- 

 note either that a dinner is well cooked or that an action is 

 moral. We are practically so well aware of the different signi- 

 fications of goodness as applied to cooking or to conduct, that a 

 system, which founds itself on an attempt to confound together 



