Lotze, and from such an insistence on feeling to a hedonistic ethics is perhaps no great leap. But Professor Ladd will have no dealings with hedonistic ethics. Even the Aristotelian distinction between happiness and pleasure is suspect to him, and is censured in a passage which is dogmatic without being either explicit or accurate. Aristotle, he says, "failed to carry out this distinction, as indeed, from the nature of the case, he was sure to do; and the very effort to make the distinction introduced a confusion into his entire ethical system which his pupils and critics have never been able to eradicate; nor will they ever be able to eradicate it, because the confusion is an integral part of the system as it was left by its author. ... Aristotle's conception of happiness is particularly guilty of the same confusions as those which distinguish modern Utilitarianism. With him, happiness is equal to the excellence of the Virtuous Life plus a considerable amount of such pleasures as to Aristotle's mind seemed indispensable and inseparably connected with the practice of some of the more imposing of the virtues—namely, liberality, large hospitality, magnificence ... (Εὐδαιμονία = ἀρετή + ἑδοναι dependent upon external goods of a certain kind)" (pp. 478-479). What the profound and ineradicable confusion is, to which Professor Ladd here alludes, is best known to himself; and the same may be said of his reason for singling out those pleasures which depend upon the possession of external goods of a certain kind.
His criticism of Utilitarianism or Hedonism is based upon a careful statement of the psychological nature and the conditions of pleasure. This statement includes, of course, the necessary commonplaces, but adds to them some observations on the sources of individual happiness which are so interesting, frank, and suggestive, that one cannot but wish that Professor Ladd had developed them much more fully. After finishing his psychological statement he continues: "If now one will keep steadily in mind the truths just stated regarding the psychological doctrine of the pleasure-pains, and also what has earlier been said concerning the nature of the Moral Self, one may, without injustice, make short work of every form of Hedonism, however subtle and well fortified with argumentation" (p. 481). It maybe questioned, however, whether any attempt to make short work of a theory which has held its ground since the beginnings of ethical science is likely to be free from injustice. And I hardly think that a hedonist like the late Professor Sidgwick would have found the criticisms here advanced very convincing. Professor Ladd argues, for instance, that we all undergo pains of discipline and self-denial in a measure
