More's discussion of the summum bonum is materially weakened by the fact that throughout he assumes what he is trying to prove. He takes it for granted that there is a morality having an objective existence of its own in the intellectual world. Moral truths exist in virtue of their own nature, and are self-dependent. The immutableness of morality, which Cudworth takes so much care to prove, More assumes. The classification of the virtues is artificial and not of much value, whether considered alone or as a part of the system.[1] The treatment of happiness is, on the whole, better than the discussion of virtue. Happiness is pleasure, but pleasures are of different kinds. There is a qualitative distinction between them considered merely as pleasures, and without any reference to their duration, after-effects, etc. Now such a distinction means that pleasure is measured by something outside itself, that something else is the standard, and, accordingly, that it cannot be an ultimate. The only measure possible in this case is moral good, i.e., virtue. But it has already been shown in the discussion of the boniform faculty that right and wrong are judged of purely by means of their power to give pleasure and pain. Virtue is referred to pleasure, and pleasure to virtue. So obvious a fallacy needs no comment. Again, happiness is made the best thing in life; and, though virtue is its necessary accompaniment or predecessor, yet what is emphasized is the fact that virtue conduces to happiness, not happiness to virtue. If this is true, what has become of the independent nature of moral truths? They no longer exist for themselves, but for something else. This contradiction More failed to recognize, probably because the immutability of morality was with him so largely an unconscious assumption.
It remains to ask whether there is any one principle that unites all the disconnected parts of ethics. More thinks such a principle unnecessary; the moral noemata should be sufficient;[2] yet, for the sake of the people who require some one truth to which the others may be reduced, he states the principle of true and sincere love of God. This is the first, the
