To the identification of perfection and activity we
may hesitate to assent. It does not seem clear
that there is greater activity manifested in a snail
than in a burning house, in maternal love than in furious
hate, in quiet thought than in passion. Yet it
seems significant that judgments of worth do not appear
out of place in comparing such things.
121. PERFECTIONISM AND INTUITIONISM.—Taking
into consideration all that is said above, it seems
not unreasonable to conclude:
(1) That in speaking of the perfection of any creature
we very often judge it only by the standard set by
its own type. We regard it as a good specimen
of its kind.
(2) But when we use perfection in a wider sense, we
judge different types after the standard furnished
by the distinctively human.
(3) And we take as our standard of the human the “pattern”
man held in view by those who urge us to follow nature.
But why should this pattern man be assumed to be better
or worthier than a man of a different sort? He
who finds in him a greater exhibition of activity
may with equal justice address to himself the question:
Why is activity, in itself, of value? The one
question, like the other, looks for its answer in
the dictum of some intuition. What may be said
for, and what against, intuitions, we have already
considered. [Footnote: See chapter xxiii]
122. THE SELF-REALIZATION DOCTRINE.—The
ethical school which makes the realization of the
capacities of the self the aim of moral action has
for a generation, especially in England and America,
had the support of many acute and scholarly minds.
The doctrine, often spoken of as the Neo-Kantian
or the Neo-Hegelian, may be said to be influenced by
Kant, so far as concerns metaphysical theory, but
its ethical character is more properly Hegelian and
suggests in many particulars that great German philosopher’s
“Philosophy of Right.”
We may conveniently take as the protagonist of the
school the Oxford scholar, Thomas Hill Green, whose
“Prolegomena to Ethics” has had, directly
and indirectly, a powerful influence upon the minds
of the men of our generation.
We find the doctrine of self-realization, as set forth
by Green, to be as follows:
(1) In all desire some object is presented to the
mind as not yet real, and there is a striving to make
it real, and thus to satisfy, or extinguish, the desire.
[Footnote: Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec 131.]
(2) Self-consciousness knits the desires into a system,
and thus attains to the conception of “well-being,”
which implies the satisfaction of desire in general,
and not merely of this or that desire. [Footnote:
Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec 128.]
(3) “Good” is that which satisfies some
desire. Any good at which an agent aims must
be his own good; and “true good” is nothing
else than “permanent well-being.” [Footnote:
Prolegomena to Ethics, Sec Sec 190, 92, 203.]
