would submit that the sense in which this or that writer uses such principles as those of Identity and Contradiction, and the way in which he develops them, cannot always safely be assumed a priori by any critic.
This is all I think it could be useful for me to say in this connection, except that I would end this Note with an expression of regret. The view adopted by Mr. Hobhouse as to the nature of the criterion has, it seems to me (I dare say quite wrongly), so very much that is common to myself, as well as also to others,[1] that I am the more sorry that I have not the advantage of his criticism on something which I could recognize as in any degree my own.
p. 407, Footnote. On the subject of Hedonism I would add references to the International Journal of Ethics, Vol. iv, pp. 384-6 and Vol. v, pp. 383-4.
pp. 458-9. We cannot, if we abstract the aspects of pleasure and pain and confine ourselves to these abstractions, discover directly within them an internal discrepancy, any more than we could do this in every abstracted sensible quality. But since these aspects are as a fact together with, first, their sensible qualities and, next, the rest of the world, and since no relation or connection of any kind can be in the end merely external, it follows that in the end the nature of pleasure or pain must somehow go beyond itself.[2]
If we take pleasure and pain, or one of them, to be not aspects of sensation but themselves special sensations, that will of course make no real difference to the argument. For in any case such sensations would be mere aspects and adjectives of their whole psychical states. I would add that, even in psychology, the above distinction seems, to me at least, to possess very little importance. The attempt again to draw a sharp distinction between discomfort and pain would (even if it could be successful) make no difference to us here.
p. 463, Note. The account of Will, given in Mind, No. 49, has been criticised by Mr. Shand in an interesting article on Attention and Will, Mind, N.S. No. 16. I at once recognized that my statement in the above account was defective, but in principle I have not found anything to correct. I still hold Will always to be the self-realization of an idea, but it is necessary to provide that this idea shall not in a certain sense conflict with that which
- ↑ Mr. Hobhouse seems to me (I suppose mistakenly) to adopt somehow in the end, as the criterion of truth and reality, the idea of a consistent all-inclusive system. If and so far as he does this, I naturally think he is right, but I think he would be wrong if and so far as he simply assumed this principle as ultimate. But as to what his view in the end actually is I could not venture an opinion, partly perhaps because I have been able to give but a limited time to his work.
- ↑ Cf. the Note on p. 363, and Notes A and B of this Appendix.
