x THE WILL IN DEVELOPMENT 197 



In this respect the Greatest Happiness Principle 

 reversed its teaching. It reduced rights and duties, 

 liberty and authority, alike to the position of means to 

 an end, and it set up in the conception of Pleasure and 

 the mitigation of pain a standard of value which it took 

 to be scientifically measurable without dependence on 

 any current ideas or traditions about right and wrong. 

 Here we come to a definite demand for the thorough- 

 going reconstitution of human institutions on the basis 

 of an intelligible theory of value. But the theory itself 

 was open to criticism from two points of view. On the 

 one hand, it supplied no adequate account of the ethical 

 motives which it postulated, and arguing that Happiness 

 alone was desirable, it yet pleaded with the individual to 

 sacrifice his own happiness if necessary for that of the 

 greater number, and could overcome the contradiction only ) 



by a supposed development of sympathetic feeling which 

 carried little conviction. On the other side, in taking 

 Happiness apart from the fullness and harmony of life on 

 which it depends, it introduced a certain unreality and a 

 certain narrowness into its ideal. It failed to satisfy the 

 deep-seated conviction that man not only the individual, 

 but the race has a function to perform, a part to play in 

 things, and that even if the race as a whole could be happy 

 without performing this function yet something essential 

 would be missed. 



This conviction is asserted in the biological conception 

 of the expansion of life, the increasing fullness of vitality 

 as expressing at once the direction in which the organic 

 world moves and the goal at which rational man should 

 aim. Unfortunately this conception, being based on 

 physical laws and not on ethical analysis, is generally pre- 

 sented in a form which fails to differentiate the aims of 

 man from those of the tiger and the wolf. The idea of 

 development has received a more human treatment both 

 at the hands of Idealism and of Positivism. In spite of 

 profound differences we have in both these methods of 

 approach the fundamental conception of the human spirit 

 working towards the fulfilment of its own being, evolving 

 out of its cravings and to meet its necessities the institu- 



