IMPULSES AND SCHOOLS OF PHILOSOPHY 93 



titude may be wasted, his habitudes may be 

 upset, should he chance to meet a woman who 

 disturbs the balance of his emotions by exciting 

 his love. 







To many men an explanation of Life or of 

 Nature appears to be unsatisfactory unless it 

 resolves the complex into the simple, unless it 

 tends towards the conclusion that the various 

 links between happenings, which we term 

 " causes," are but manifestations of an ultimate 

 unity of purpose. They will condemn as retro- 

 gressive even as absurd an attempt to account 

 for human behaviour by attributing it to a num- 

 ber of inconsistent and antagonistic impulses. 

 Yet if we review the endeavours which have been 

 made by men of intellect during the past twenty- 

 five centuries to discover the foundations and 

 foresee the ultimate development of human 

 conduct and, in the theories of ethics and 

 political economy, to formulate the aspirations 

 that should guide it we shall conclude that their 

 ideals have been as numerous and as diverse as 

 the impulses which we have been cataloguing, and 

 may, indeed, be generally defined as the accept- 

 ance of one or other of these impulses as superior 

 in strength or desirability to all others. So 

 Epicureanism idealizes the individualistic im- 

 pulses, Altruism the social impulses, Stoicism 

 the ethical impulses of self-restraint, Hedonism 

 the aesthetic impulses of self-abandonment. We 

 may, in like fashion, conclude that kindliness is 

 the moral ideal of Christianity. Political Economy 

 is concerned with the methods in which the 

 provident impulses can be most effectively satis- 

 fied. Reason, which, as we shall see, may also 

 be classed as an impulse, is adopted by some 

 philosophers as the guiding star that will lead 



