you put the ‘feeling pleased’ on the one side, and the ‘my’ on the other? I know but one theory on which this is possible, and that is the view which, while it regards the distinctions of ‘me’ and ‘you’ as mere illusion or ‘Maja,’ nevertheless maintains that the pleasure and pain are not mere illusion. Against this view I am not called on to argue, and Mr. Sidgwick is, I imagine, no more a friend to it than I am.
I have criticized Mr. Sidgwick sharply, not from want of respect, but because I must be brief and fear to be obscure. Whether I understand him or not, I do not know; and with respect to what Mr. Bain has said on the same subject this again is my case. As to what he means by ‘disinterested action’ I have not the least idea. He speaks of ‘entering into the feelings of another being,’ which, on his view, is to me much as if he said, ‘One bag of marbles enters into the marbles of another bag;’ and again (Emotions, etc., ed. iii. p. 267), he talks of ‘pleasures whose nature is to take in other sentient beings,’ which, again, is as if he said, ‘There are some marbles whose nature it is to take in other bags of marbles.’ Either these things are illusions or not. If they are not, it seems to me they revolutionize the whole of Mr. Bain’s psychology. If they are, I want to know whether and why we are to rest our Ethics upon them. What seems clear to me is this—Pleasure is the one end, or it is not. If it is not, then Hedonism goes. If it is, then my pleasure is my end. The pleasure of others is neither a feeling in me, nor an idea of a feeling in me. If it seems to be so, this is a mere illusion. If what is not my feeling or its idea is my end, then the root of Hedonism is torn up. If so, the argument from the individual to the race disappears, because pleasure is not the sole end of the individual.
In this plight, nothing is left to Hedonism but an appeal to the facts of society. If these show that progress so far involves increase of pleasure (and here, on the question of fact, Hedonism has to meet Pessimism), that does not prove it will be always so; still less does it prove that the idea of increase of pleasure is the moving cause of progress, and even less that it ought to be.
