[369] On p. 345 the words are: “When we consider the naïve or elementary life of morality and religion”; and on p. 346: “The naïve, or simple self of every-day morality and religion,” and the marginal heading of the page upon which these words occur is “The naïve good self compared to grasp of a fundamental principle alone.” Could anything more clearly indicate what the Kantians call a confusion of categories [in the case in point the categories of “goodness” and the categories of “truth”] or what Aristotle calls a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος, the unconscious treatment of one order of facts by the terms and conceptions of another order of facts. To Dr. Bosanquet as the Neo-Hellenist that he is in his professed creed, badness is practically stupidity, and “lack of unification of life,” and “failure of theoretical grasp.” This confusion between goodness and wisdom is again indicated on p. 347 in the words: “A man is good in so far as his being is ‘unified at’ all in any sphere of wisdom or activity.” [This is simply not true, and its falsity is a more unforgivable thing in the case of Dr. Bosanquet than it is in the case of the pragmatists who also tend to make the ‘moral’ a kind of ‘unification’ or ‘effectiveness’ in ‘purpose.’] As a proof of Dr. Bosanquet’s transformation of the facts of the ethical life in the interest of logical theory, we can point to p. 334: “Our actions and ideas issue from our world as a conclusion from its premises, or as a poem from its author’s spirit,” or to p. 53, where it is definitely stated that the “self, as it happens to be,” cannot, in any of its “three aspects,” “serve as a test of reality.” To do the latter, it must, in his opinion, follow the law of the “universal,” i.e. become a logical conception. Now of course (1) it is not the self “as it happens to be” that is chiefly dealt with in ethics, but rather the self as it ought to be. And (2) the ethical self, or the “person,” does not follow the “law of the universal” goodness in the wider or (‘shall we say’) in the narrower sense.” Now the distinction between ethics and aesthetics is not one of degree, but one of kind.
And as another illustration of his tendency to transform ethical facts in the light of a metaphysical, or a logical, theory [they are the same thing to him] we may quote the emphatic declaration on p. 356: “Our effort has been to bring the conception of moral and individual initiative nearer to the idea of logical determination,” or the equally outspoken declaration on p. 353: “But metaphysical theory, viewing the self in its essential basis of moral solidarity with the natural and social world ... cannot admit that the independence of the self, though a fact, is more than a partial fact.” Or the words at the top of this same page: “The primary principle that should govern the whole discussion is this, that the attitude of moral judgment and responsibility for decisions is only one among other attitudes and spheres of experience.” These last words alone would prove definitely the non-ethical character of “Individuality and Value.” The ethical life is to its author only a “quatenus consideratur,” only a possible point of view, only an aspect of reality, only an aspect, therefore, of a “logical system.” Now if the ethical life of the world is to count for anything at all, it may be said that the ethical life is no mere aspect of the life of the self, and no mere aspect of the life of the world, seeing that “nature” in the sense of mere “physical nature” does not come into the sphere of morality at all. It is rather the activity of the “whole self,” or the “normative” reflection of the self as a whole upon all the merely partial or subordinate aspects of its activity, upon bodily life, economic life, intellectual activity, and so on that constitutes the world of morality.
[370] See [p. 147], and [p. 244].
[371] Good and evil to Dr. Bosanquet are two quasi-rational systems in active antagonism as claiming to attach different “principles and predicates” to identical data. The essence of their antagonism to Dr. Bosanquet is not, however, that evil is contemplated, as it must be sooner or later, in repentance for example as wrong, but rather that the “evil” is an imperfect “logical striving (p. 351) of the self after unity” which is in “contradiction with a fuller and sounder striving” after the same. The evil self is to him merely the vehicle of a logical contradiction in the self.
[372] This is seen in his admission (on p. 351) that the “bad will” no less than the “good will” is a logical necessity, when taken along with his doctrine about mind and body, his doctrine of the “dependence” (p. 318) of the finite individual upon the external mechanical world. Dr. Bosanquet, of course, thinks that even in this apparent Determinism he is justifiably supplementing the ordinary ideas about the “self” as “creative” and “originative” (p. 354), by the wider recognition that I am more or less completely doing the work of the “universe” as a “member” in a “greater self.” And he adds in the same sentence the words that “I am in a large measure continuous with the greater (p. 355) self,” and “dyed with its colours”—a further step in Determinism, as it were, and a step which, with the preceding one to which we have just referred, no critic can fail to connect with the Determinism that we have already found to be implicated in his doctrine of the “self,” and in his general doctrine that the “external” must be frankly accepted as a factor in the universe.
[373] By the “spectator” fallacy we mean his tendency to talk and think of the self as it is for a spectator or student, looking at matters from the outside, and not as the self is for the man himself.
[374] Wollaston is the English ethical philosopher who, according to Leslie Stephen’s account, thought, after thirty years of meditation, that the only reason he had for not breaking his wife’s head with a stick was, that this would be tantamount to a denial that his wife was his wife.
[375] See Idola Theatri by Henry Sturt (the editor of the well-known “Personal Idealism” volume) of Oxford—a book that enumerates and examines many of the fallacies of the Neo-Hegelian school. Mr. Sturt’s first chapter is entitled the “Passive Fallacy,” which he calls, with some degree of justice, the prime mistake of the idealistic philosophy, meaning by this the “ignoring” of the “kinetic” and the “dynamic” character of our experience.
[376] It is Natural Theology that is the subject proper of the Gifford Lectures.