idealism itself. As overt utterances it is their function to confirm and strengthen the quality of idealism which they have expressed.[1]
It is better to understand them so and to prize them in their proper ideal quality than to turn them to a use which belittles them. For happiness taken as a criterion can mean only pleasure, and pleasure the fixation of present habit. Self-realization, in the same misuse, means either an unacknowledged reverence for accredited tradition[2] or, for the newly enlightened, a shallow impatience of traditional restraints. The virtues harden into a Pharisaical dogmatism. It is no disparagement of the ideals of ethical theory to say that if they are held aloof from such misapplication, it is a matter of no great moment which one of them one professes. To say this means that they are all members of one series or one system, so related that, starting from any one, as a man's temperament, perhaps, may determine, one may make a dialectical circuit of them all. This indeed is why the history of ethics is a history of controversy. Kept as ideals they may all serve equally, because as ideals they are all alike names for deliverance and escape and signs of renewed interest in living. To conceive them as ends, and so to apply them as criteria, is to take
- ↑ "No, my good sirs, let us put aside, for the present at any rate, all inquiry into the real nature of the chief good. ... But I am willing to talk to you about that which appears to be an off-shoot of the chief good, and bears the strongest resemblance to it. ... Are you aware ... that whenever [one] looks at objects on which the sun is shining, these very eyes ... see clearly and are evidently the seat of distinct vision ? ... Now [the] power which supplies the objects of real knowledge with the truth that is in them ... you must consider to be the essential Form of Good. ... And just as, in the analogous case, it is right to regard light and vision as resembling the sun, but wrong to identify them with the sun; so, in the case of science and truth, it is right to regard both of them as resembling good but wrong to identify either of them with good [which] far from being identical with real existence, actually transcends it in dignity and power. Glaucon: Good heavens! What a miraculous superiority." (Republic, 506-509. Davies and Vaughan, transl.)
- ↑ The ethics of self-realization sees that moral criteria must be concrete and conceives its ideal accordingly as a concrete universal. This is its essential and gratuitous mistake. Abstractness, i.e., riddance of the incidents of time and circumstance which would tie reminiscence tightly to the past, is the chief virtue of an ideal. It becomes a defect only when the ideal is turned to an inappropriate use for which concreteness is of course indispensable.
