NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
This is an important contribution to Ethics by a new writer. It is at the same time a well-informed criticism of "the doctrine of good as private" and an able argument for a social or communal interpretation of it. The fundamental error which Mr. Hirst finds in the English moralists with the exception of Green, and also in Kant, is the distinction, if not separation, of egoistic from altruistic interests; the view for which he contends is the identity of these interests. Of this more adequate view he finds important statements in Plato and Aristotle among the ancients and in Rousseau and Comte, as well as Green, among the moderns. His own restatement of it attaches itself to the psychology of instinct, as given by McDougall and Shand, and seeks to develop along this line the teachings of the earlier philosophers just mentioned. Such an ethic, he believes, will give a more adequate interpretation of the modern social conscience and of the Christian ideal of human life.
The first, or critical, part of the book suffers from its excessive condensation, which gives an air of dogmatism and even superficiality to a treatment of the views of the earlier moralists which is in reality informed by accurate knowledge and careful reflection. It must be admitted that in his anxiety to identify the good of self with that of neighbor, Mr. Hirst sometimes ignores the reality and importance of the distinction between these goods. For example, he criticises Kant for holding that "we cannot directly further another's perfection. All we can do is to remove any hindrances to his self-realisation. For the rest, we may contribute to the happiness of our neighbor. ... A certain dualism is therefore disclosed as between the treatment of ourselves as ends and of others as ends the end for 'ego' being morality but for 'alter' happiness. In spite of appearances to the contrary there is no real relationship of an ethical kind established between 'ego' and 'alter'" (p. 37). But surely when Kant says that to regard another person as an end-in-himself is to regard him as having ends of his own and to identify ourselves with these ends, he is not only securing a concrete content for the abstract imperative of morality but also establishing a very real relation of an ethical kind between ego and alter. Nor can it be denied that each must work out his own salvation, or that the happiness of another may have a different claim upon me from my own happiness.
Similarly, it is surely an overstatement to represent the ethics of the Moral Sense school, and more especially of Hutcheson and Hume, as "the doctrine of good as private," and to say that "in such writers as Shaftesbury, Hutche-
