It seems a most courageous thing to have done to have written a book with such a title as "The Rational Good." One wonders that the publishers allowed it. Rationality, as a dependable guide in human affairs, seems to have gone out of fashion. In individual life the instinct has been ruling supreme; and the struggle of instincts for supremacy has become the absorbing indoor sport. In social life, we are now all so sophisticated that we see in the movements of history and in the economic and political developments only the play and interplay of unreasoned interests; and if there is actually an appearance of reasoning about certain situations or outcomes, we smile superiorly and say: "Only a rationalization."
Mr. Hobhouse brings us back to some degree of sanity in these matters. The impulses and interests and all the other forces that drive for satisfaction are well enough in their way, but they are not the last word. The last word lies with the order or system into which they fit or do not fit. The real drive of life—the deep, persistent drive—is towards harmony. Reason is just the expression of this drive. In the degree to which we recognize it, we achieve a harmony of desires and efforts that is far reaching and permanent; in the degree to which we do not recognize it, our harmonies are built upon shifting sands.
All this is an old story, but one which needs reissuing from the press. The distinctive contribution which Mr. Hobhouse's book makes the book is only a more elaborate ethical application of the views worked out in his Development and Purpose is his view of Reason as a process in a world which is neither totally harmonious nor totally inharmonious but a harmony in the making. This view of a developing harmony gives Mr. Hobhouse a unique opportunity for criticism both of the Utilitarians and of the Ethical Idealists. With reference to the former, he is able to draw the distinction between personality as a principle of synthesis (the permanent drive towards a harmonic system) and a sum of pleasurable states. With reference to the latter, he is able to show a divergence in the respect that Green insists on treating the "element of pleasure in the good rather as a secondary consequence than as an integral and essential element." As a matter of fact, according to Mr. Hobhouse, the good is nothing if it does not appeal to feeling. The complete harmonization of feeling and effort is the Rational Good. In the second place, moreover, Green's self-realization view seems to "suggest too optimistic a solution of fundamental ethical difficulties. If indeed the social harmony were perfect, we might lay it down that the good of the whole would be the synthesis of the good of each member." But the social harmony is not perfect, but only on the way to becoming less imperfect. Hence, observes Mr. Hobhouse acutely, the actual needs of the social order at any given time may involve the curtailment of developments for which a higher harmony might find a place. The service of society may
