This Shaftesbury feels, and attempts to meet by showing the necessary connection of the happiness of the individual with that of all; that is, he falls back on hedonism. But he knows Aristotle too well to propound a passive hedonism such as that of Hobbes. A careful examination of his fundamental principles, especially in his less well-known works, The Moralists, and the Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, will show that he purposes to make a distinction in the quality of pleasures, and that the question was not "who loved himself, or who not; but who loved and served himself the rightest, and after the truest manner."[1] His central thought is that of the universe as a spiritual organism in which each member has a vital interest in the good of the whole. This principle, if carried out consistently, would have carried him beyond the abstract individualism and hedonism of his age, but the time had not yet come when the value of consciousness could be justly appreciated. Shaftesbury remains in his half-way position, scorning Hobbes, yet unable consciously to pass beyond him.
To recapitulate, then: this problem of authority, which was the burning question for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was answered with any degree of clearness by Hobbes alone. However much we may despise his character, reject his psychology, or undervalue his ethics, we must admire the consistency and clearness of his thought in comparison with that of his critics. Had the lesson of his philosophy been taken to heart by those who are his legitimate successors, we should have had fewer attempts to make the impossible passage from the pleasure of one to that of all by a bridge no longer than that of feeling. His weakness, like that of his contemporaries and successors for a century to come, was in his failure to realize the meaning of consciousness, as seen in the constant confusion of fact with consciousness of fact, and of instinctive tendency with conscious purpose. The result was a knowledge without reality, and a morality without ideals.
| Norman Wilde. |
| Columbia College.. |
- ↑ Characteristics, I, p. 121.
