judgments are inadequate and are "somehow" transcended in the Absolute, but dogmatically to say that they are false and that others, which are admitted not to commend themselves to our actual moral consciousness, are true. Any inadequacy, or doubt, or invalidity that may cleave to the former judgment must cleave surely a fortiori to the last.

And on what does the supposed intellectual necessity for this reversal of all our canons of value turn? Upon an ideal of our thought. Why should this intellectual ideal of selfconsistency or harmony be regarded as a safer guide to the true nature of things than that ideal of Morality which claims in us to be of absolute and objective validity, and so to represent the true end of a rational will ? There can be no real "harmony" or "perfection," or absence of contradiction, in any picture or ideal or system of the Universe in which our highest ideals of value are flatly contradicted.

The only way in which, as it seems to me, Mr. Bradley could escape the force of these objections, would be by absolutely giving up the use of the terms good and evil in thinking of the Absolute, and cancelling all that he has said about the goodness of the Absolute, and, I must add, all that he has said about the intrinsic reasonableness of the Universe; for a reasonable Universe means a Universe which realises ends that are intrinsically good, and it is only from our judgments of value that we know anything about goodness or indeed about ends. And on one side of his thought Mr. Bradley certainly goes very near to an avowed adoption of this position. When Mr. Bradley pronounces the Absolute good, we naturally suppose him to mean something by the assertion; but eventually, in the last paragraph of his book, he comes near to admitting that he means nothing by it. For there he tells us that "the Reality is our criterion of worse and better, of ugliness and beauty, of true and false, of real and unreal. It, in brief, decides between, and gives a general meaning to,

B

higher and lower." * If, then, the real is our sole criterion of worth, if a thing is good in proportion to the amount of real being in it, the assertion that the Absolute is good means no more than the assertion that the Absolute is real. Now for us it is quite certain that the word good does not mean the same as real, unless Mr. Bradley chooses, by definition, to make the word real include our idea of good. If it be said that in the Absolute this difference is to be transcended, at all events our idea of good must be allowed to represent as important an aspect of the Absolute as our idea of real. It must not be simply cancelled, as is done when it is suggested that in or for the Absolute cruelty is good.

V.

But whatever reply the doctrine of degrees of Truth and Reality may be supposed to contain to such criticisms as I have ventured to make on this doctrine of a super-moral Absolute, that qualification is entirely absent from the treatment of the subject in Professor Taylor's Problem of Conduct,† a work of which I desire to speak with sincere respect.

There the contradiction between the human and ethical point of view and the super-moral or absolute point of view is treated as absolute and unmitigated. From the point of view of the Absolute sin and wickedness, pain and wretchedness, are not simply good: they are, it would appear, as good as pleasure and goodness. Virtue was never lauded in a pæan of more enthusiastic eloquence than that in which Professor Taylor sings the praises of wickedness. + Against such a position the objections on which I have insisted seem to me to tell with their full weight. If our moral judgments are not merely

* Appearance and Reality, p. 552.

† I refer here only to The Problem of Conduct. In his more recent Elements of Metaphysic the doctrine of degrees upon which his whole metaphysical position is based is to some extent brought into connection with ethics.

‡ The Problem of Conduct, p. 473.

(as they are to Mr. Bradley) riddled with contradictions, and so very inadequate and untrustworthy presentments of Reality, but purely and unmitigatedly subjective, what reason has Professor Taylor for pronouncing that the Universe as a whole is perfectly good? Mr. Bradley has never denied that moral judgments are rational; he has not even denied them a kind of objectivity; Professor Taylor has reduced them to modes of feeling. This seems to follow from the declaration (p. 104) that our moral judgments are simply "feelings of approval and disapproval," while it is further admitted that "to say that I approve such and such an action or quality is in fact to say that when I imagine its entrance into the course of my future experience my state of mind is a pleasant one" (p. 124). Yet if the idea of value is not a category of thought, what can be meant by the judgment that the world is perfectly good on the whole? What can "good" in such a connection mean? For Professor Taylor it ought only to mean that it excites a particular kind of feeling in the genus homo or some of its members. But Professor Taylor admits that it does not excite this feeling in him, for to him as a man sin and pain appear bad. On what ground then can he pronounce that for the Absolute or in the Absolute they appear good? If goodness be merely a feeling, why should we suppose that the Absolute shares the peculiar mode of human feeling which we style moral; or if we do think that the Absolute shares these human emotions, or something analogous to them, why should we suppose that they are excited in Him by different courses of action to those which excite them in us? To oppose to our deliberate judgments of value an a priori construction about the requirements of absolute harmony and the like in a perfect or absolute or "pure" experience, seems to me to put mere intellectual aspirations in place of the rational interpretation of actual experience. Two further criticisms may be made against Professor Taylor's argument which cannot be urged against Mr. Bradley :

(1) He does not share Mr. Bradley's view that all selfrealisation and all self-sacrifice are good. Nobody has criticised this side of Mr. Bradley's doctrine with more acuteness than Professor Taylor himself. He does not deny that in ordinary cases the moral consciousness is quite equal to the task of pronouncing that here self-sacrifice would be right and there wrong. His denial of objectivity to the moral judgment is apparently based solely on the existence of hard cases in which no one will trust very confidently to his own solution of the casuistical problem, or severely condemn those who solve it differently. The existence of such cases no more shows that there is not a solution which would commend itself to a perfectly rational intelligence endowed with perfect knowledge of the facts, than the higher Mathematics are proved to be a purely subjective affair by the existence of mathematical problems which no one could solve but the late Professor Cayley, and of others which await the solution of future Cayleys.

(2) Another difficulty of Professor Taylor's is that the details of human duty-the Seventh Commandment for instance -depend upon the physiological structure of human beings, and could not be supposed to be the same for a being of different constitution. I really think Professor Taylor might have given his opponents credit for having contemplated and dealt with so simple an objection. The objectivity of our moral judgments even in detail is not destroyed by the fact that duties are relative to the constitution of the species, just as they are relative to the circumstances of individual persons. When I say that the Seventh Commandment possesses objective validity, I mean that every intelligence which thinks truly must recognise that it is the right course of action for beings physiologically and psychologically constituted as we are. Moreover, these details of duty must in the last resort be dependent upon general principles of action or canons of value which are valid for all beings and all circumstances. The proposition that the love of husband for wife in an ideal marriage is one of the noblest things in the Universe is not shaken by the fact that the lower animals are incapable of it, and that superior beings (to say nothing of God himself) may be above it. And this particular judgment depends upon the judgment which asserts the supreme value of love in generala judgment which, I should contend, is of objective validity and quite independent of the structure of particular individuals or of the societies to which they belong.

I quite recognise, of course, that in taking up the position which I have criticised, Professor Taylor has no intention of practically disparaging morality and moral obligation. Mr. Taylor has, indeed, a practical insight into ethical questions not always found in Moral Philosophers. But after all man is a rational being, and I do not believe that this sharp conflict between what a man believes as a man and what he believes as a philosopher is one which can permanently be kept up. Of course, we have always the assurance to fall back upon that in the Absolute all is perfect harmony and order. The whole of Professor Taylor's system is based upon the necessity of satisfying an intellectual need for harmony: what I submit is that that system conspicuously fails to satisfy one of the most imperative of intellectual needs the demand for objective validity in our moral judgments, the demand that some sort of harmony shall be established between our ethical judgments and our beliefs about the Universe.

In justice to Mr. Taylor I ought to say that the attitude which he adopts towards morality in his Elements of Metaphysic seems to me materially different from that taken up in the Problem of Conduct. He is there willing even to accept (doubtless with reserves and apologies) the idea that one side of the Absolute's nature may be expressed by the word Love, and generally appears-not merely in his character as a man, but also as a Philosopher-to interpret the nature of the Absolute