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]
III. SELF-REALIZATION
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.]