fullness of life ; for, on the one hand, we have pleasure—a sensation or specific content of consciousness—the last result of analysis and abstraction, the structural element, and, on the other, we have consciousness as a function or process in its widest and deepest concreteness, the fullest, most generalized statement of psychic life. Pleasure is consciousness with the minimum of reference; life-process is consciousness with the maximum of reference. Pleasure, of course, does enter into the end, but not any more than do all other sensational elements of mind.
It is conceivable that, in some elementary form of life, such as the "ancestral worm" of Mr. Herbert Nichols, wherein the nervous structure had not differentiated into various sense-organs, consciousness, if it can so be called, was a mere oscillation between agreeable and disagreeable feeling,[1] and that in this case something analogous to pleasure may have been the end of endeavor. But in developed human consciousness, pleasure is nothing more than a single special element in a most complex psychosis, and it cannot be imagined as the essential end or resolution of a tangle of other special processes. From this point of view, the hedonist's conception of the ideal is necessarily a static one, unless, indeed, it is one which will grow still narrower as, with the further development of mind, pleasure comes to be but one among an ever-increasing number of discernible qualities. Spencer, moreover, explicitly posits a static ideal, when he says that pleasure is the universal and the permanent end. He teaches that not only civilized men, but savages as well, and even animals, seek pleasure. From the point of view of biology, psychology, and sociology, and from the first to the final stages of evolution, he makes pleasure the sole aim.
A second phase in which the psychological view may be discussed comes under the categories of intention and the Good. Spencer seems to slight the importance, for judgments of right and wrong, of the factor of motive or intention; for he always sets the criterion of a good act in its result. The situation seems to be this: that one tendency in ethical thought is toward judging an act good or bad according to the intention or the character
- ↑ Höffding supposes as much in his Psychology.
