true. If it were so we should not be moral. In our hearts and lives the ideal self is actually carried out, our will is made one with it and does realize it, although the bad self never disappears and the good self is incoherent and partial. ‘Well but,’ comes the objection, ‘Hedonism can say this too. There too the end is partially realized.’ Not so, we reply. Asking for this partial reality, we are told to look at that fraction of the sum of pleasures which has been reached; and we say at once, that is not actual at all; in that you have got nothing whatever. The past is past, and to have had a feeling is not to have it; so that in ordinary Hedonism I do but try to heap up what dies in the moment of its birth, and can not thus get nearer to the possession of anything. In morality on the other hand the past is present now in the will, and the will is the reality of the good. Common Hedonism can not say this.
(2) But the question remains, Does not morality pursue a fallacious object? Is it not a mere quantitative approach to zero? We answer, No, it is a great deal more. On the side of the bad self the moral end is certainly to produce the nothingness of that, and mere negative morality is destroyed by our objector’s question. But, as we have explained above (p. 211), true morality is the positive assertion of the good will. It aims then, we may say, at the zero of morality as such (i.e. as struggle against the bad), but not at the zero of the positive will for good.
(3) But, let this be as it may, is not morality the approximation to an endless quantity; does it not labour in vain for the false infinite? Again we say, No. The moral end is not a sum of units: it is qualitative perfection. What I want is not mere increase of quantity; but, given a certain quantum of energy in my will, I desire the complete expenditure of that in behalf of the ideal. The object is for me to become an infinite whole by making my will one with an infinite whole. The size of the whole, as such, is not considered at all. It is true that, though mere quantity is not the end, yet the end implies quantity. Perfect good means zero of badness and zero of neutral or undeveloped energy. Hence degrees of advance to moral perfection can be measured by the lessening extent of the non-moral and the immoral. But the suppression of these negatives as such is not the end; and
