pleasure. This means that he perceives two things, (1) that he desires his private pleasure; (2) that he desires the reasonable. Put them together, and you get the argument; (a) The reasonable is not my private pleasure, (b) Other people’s pleasure is not my private pleasure. Therefore (c) other people’s pleasure is reasonable. Or, if this is not meant, perhaps the assertion is that the isolated man sees two things together, both that his pleasure is the reasonable end, and that not his pleasure, but pleasure as such, is so. In that case would it not be better to say at once, ‘I intuitively perceive that the Utilitarian conclusion is right’? for then the reply, ‘But I do not,’ would end the argument.
However Mr. Sidgwick may get to his conclusion, he has to make it good against two parties—(1) those who assert the right and reasonable, but deny that it is pleasure; (2) those who deny the right and reasonable, but assert pleasure as my private pleasure. (1) The first party (so far as I can represent them) have spoken already. We deny the intuition, and the reasoning we have sufficiently refuted by stating it; and if we wished to do more, we should do well to press for some further account of the phrases ‘objectively desirable,’ ‘real end of reason,’ &c. If my pleasure is my sole end, if the objective is (also) my end, then I should say there is a hopeless contradiction in which we stick. (2) But Mr. Sidgwick’s attitude towards Egoism is more instructive. Having first (after Butler) rightly denied the basis of Hedonism, viz. the assertion that I desire nothing but pleasure, he throws himself repentant into the arms of the true faith, and says, ‘Though as a fact other things are or seem to be desired, yet nothing but my pleasure is desirable.’ ‘My pleasure is the end.’ Here we have Egoism. ‘But,’ says Mr. Sidgwick, ‘the right and reasonable is objectively desirable.’ ‘Not so,’ replies the Egoist. ‘The objectively desirable is a fiction. The distinction of desired and desirable is wholly fallacious, unless “desirable” is a clumsy name for the means to what I desire. The end is what I do desire, and that is just what I happen to like; “reasonable” is what I correctly conclude is a means to that; and as for “right” and “ought,” if they are not a misleading way of saying this over again, they are as nonsensical as “objective end of reason.”’ And against this Mr. Sidgwick, having left the only true line, has nothing to say, but that he hopes the Egoist will be good enough to admit that something is objectively desirable as an end. If the Egoist does so, he is ‘suppressed’ certainly, and deserves to be. But will he do so? I recommend the reader to peruse Stirner’s book, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum.
Mr. Sidgwick asserts that only my pleasure is desirable, and that I desire this as objectively desirable. But (1) if I desire my pleasure as mine in particular, is it not a flat contradiction to say I desire it as not mine in particular? and (2) can I desire my pleasure as pleasure in general? Is not that a pure fiction invented to support a weak compromise,—a fiction which neither of the parties opposed would, if they understood their position, attend to for a moment? Is my feeling pleased anything but my feeling pleased? Can
