by Bart Schultz
tian conception of human beings as the children of God – souls endowed
with free will and somewhere in between the beasts and the angels, striving
or being drawn to ever fuller awareness of the Divine spark within, the very
ground of one’s being. Persons are special; the experience of freedom that
each has is revelatory of how much more there is than the natural world.
Sidgwick would always admit the force of the key analogy: “If the aggre-
gate of thoughts and feelings into which the world as empirically known
to me is analysable has every element of it connected by reference to a self-
conscious subject, we may argue from analogy that there must be such a
subject similarly related to the Universe” (LPK ). Consciousness, as so
many philosophers of mind continue to urge, just does manifest a special
unity and integration. With Green, there is a further Hegelian admixture
in this, since the striving for perfection involves a world-historical form
of spiritual progress, but his is decidedly a Hegel moderated by Kant and
by a warmer feeling for the achievements of English civilization.
The Hegelian twist in Green’s remarks, to the effect that a deeper
logic can account for the necessary appearance of circularity in ordinary
reasoning – which was just bound to be incoherent when it bumped up
against its limits – would appear time and again in Idealist criticisms
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of Sidgwick. In fact, the first Idealist salvo against Sidgwick’s Methods,
in print at least, came not from Green but from Bradley, whose Ethical
Studies appeared in . This work, often regarded as the breakthrough
statement of British Idealism, makes some reference to Sidgwick, who in
turn reviewed it in Mind – rather unfavorably:
At any rate, whatever the author may have intended, I venture to think that
uncritical dogmatism constitutes the largest and most interesting element of
Mr. Bradley’s work. It is true that his polemical writing, especially his attack on
ethical and psychological hedonism . . . is always vigorous, and frequently acute and suggestive: but often again, just at the nodes of his argument, he lapses provokingly into mere debating-club rhetoric; and his apprehension of the views which
he assails is always rather superficial and sometimes even unintelligent. This last
defect seems partly due to his limited acquaintance with the whole process of
English ethical thought, partly to the contemptuous asperity with which he treats
opposing doctrines: for really penetrating criticism, especially in ethics, requires
a patient effort of intellectual sympathy which Mr. Bradley has never learned
to make, and a tranquillity of temper which he seems incapable of maintaining.
Nor again, does he appear to have effectively criticised his own fundamental po-
sitions, before putting them before the public. His main ethical principle is that
Self-Realisation is the ultimate end of practice: but in Essay II . . . the reader is startled by the communication that Mr. Bradley “does not properly speaking know
what he means when he says ‘self ’ and ‘real’ and ‘realise’.” The frankness of this
confession disarms satire. . . .
Manifestly, Sidgwick was out to teach his obnoxious, irritable junior
from Oxford a few Apostolic lessons about how to pursue truth. This
review was followed up, in Mind, by an unrepentant reply from Bradley
and a further rejoinder from Sidgwick – if anything even more damning,
though also quite revealing:
Mr. Bradley seems to be under a strange impression that, while professing to
write a critical notice of his views on ethics, I have been or ought to have been –
defending my own. I entertain quite a different notion of a reviewer’s ‘station and
duties.’ In criticising his book (or any other) I put out of sight my own doctrines,
in so far as I am conscious of them as peculiar to myself: and pass my judgments
from a point of view which I expect my readers generally to share with me. Hence
the references in his reply to my opinions would be quite irrelevant, even if he
understood those opinions somewhat better than he does. I passed lightly over
his attack on Hedonism in Essay III for the simple reason – which I gave – that I
thought it less interesting and important than other parts of his work. Much of it,
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as he must be perfectly aware, either has no bearing on Hedonism as I conceive it,
or emphasises defects which I have myself pointed out: the rest consists chiefly of
familiar anti-hedonistic commonplaces: the freshest argument I could find was one
with which I had made acquaintance some years ago in Mr. Green’s Introduction
to Hume. This, as stated by Mr. Green, I have taken occasion to answer in the
course of an article in the present number of this journal. The attack on my
book appended to Essay III, though not uninstructive to myself, is far too full of
misunderstandings to be profitable for discussion. It is criticism of the kind that
invites explanation rather than defense: such explanation I proposed to give in its
proper place – which was certainly not my notice of Mr. Bradley.
In short, Sidgwick has “nothing to retract or qualify on any of the
points raised by Mr. Bradley – except a pair of inverted commas which
were accidentally attached to a phrase of my own.” Apparently, he held
to this (plausible) judgment that whatever was interesting in Bradley was
due to Green and that he was better off addressing the latter; at least, he
would continue to write and lecture about Green’s philosophy, while flatly
ignoring Bradley’s further productions, including the long pamphlet on
“Mr. Sidgwick’s Hedonism” that appeared in .
As Schneewind has suggested, Sidgwick was largely right to be unim-
pressed by Bradley’s early statement of the Idealist case. The best one can
say of Bradley’s charges – for example, that the very notion of a sum of
pleasures is incoherent, like all the rest of phenomenal appearances – is
that they “depend on certain doctrines, concerning either the internal-
ity of relations, which makes certain types of abstraction illegitimate, or
the concrete universal as the necessary structure of the moral end, which
makes it impossible that the end should be a ‘mere aggregate’,” and these
doctrines are scarcely developed in either Bradley or Green when they
criticize Sidgwick. Indeed, Bradley’s larger view in Ethical Studies rests
“on the unstated Hegelian idea that the world spirit, operating through
us, moves ever onward to new stages in its development. The task of the
philosophical owl that flies at twilight is to articulate the developments
> the world spirit has already undergone. Philosophy can no more antici-
pate its evolution in morality than it can in science.” Thus, as Schneewind
notes, this position is fundamentally at odds “with Sidgwick’s belief that
the same principle which provides an adequate explication of the ‘morality
current in the world’ must also provide the basis for a method of rectifying
that morality.” Bradley’s plain man, who has identified with the moral
spirit of his community and acts out of decent unreflective habit, has no
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need of the philosopher, who, if it is Bradley, will insist that the philoso-
pher is indeed perfectly useless and has absolutely nothing to contribute
to ordinary practice, to making the world a better place.
Given the general fate of Idealist metaphysics and logic, it would be
easy to conclude that what was lurking behind the Idealists’ criticisms
of Sidgwick was not such as to seriously threaten the viability of his
views, however powerful the academic standing of Idealism was during
its heyday. And in fact, when Sidgwick does address Green, it is for
the most part in a remarkably effective manner. For Green rather obvi-
ously misunderstood utilitarianism from beginning to end, more or less
constantly confusing it with hedonistic psychological egoism and render-
ing it as a mishmash of the least compelling parts of Bentham and Mill.
Sidgwick, in addressing the bits from the Prolegomena quoted earlier, has a
fairly easy time of it, given the gulf of implausibility lying between his min-
imal metaethical account of reason and the full-blooded Idealist account,
with all its perfectionist elements:
If such objects, then, as Truth, Freedom, and Beauty, or strictly speaking, the
objective relations of conscious minds which we call cognition of Truth, con-
templation of Beauty and Independence of Action, are good, independently of
the pleasures that we derive from them, it must be reasonable to aim at these for
mankind generally, and not at happiness only: and this view seems, though not
the prevailing one, to be widely accepted among cultivated persons.
When I compare the cognition of Truth, contemplation of Beauty, volition to
realise Freedom or Virtue, with Pleasure, in respect of their relation to Ultimate
Good, I would justify my own view that it is Pleasure alone, desirable Feeling, that
is ultimately and intrinsically good, by the only kind of argument of which the case
seems to me to admit. I would point out that we may be led to regard as mistaken our
preferences for the conditions, concomitants or consequences of consciousness, as
distinguished from the consciousness itself, and in order to show this, I would ask
the reader to use the same twofold procedure that I have regarded as applicable
in considering the absolute and independent validity of common moral precepts.
I would appeal, firstly, to his intuitive judgment after due consideration of the
question fairly placed before it: and, secondly, to a comprehensive comparison
of the ordinary judgments of mankind. As regards the first argument, to me at
least it seems clear that these objective relations of the conscious subject, when
distinguished in reflective analysis from the consciousness accompanying and
resulting from them, are not ultimately and intrinsically desirable, any more than
material or other objects are, when considered out of relation to conscious existence altogether.
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Now, how does Green answer this argument? So far as I can see, he ignores it.
He answers . . . an argument, involving Psychological Hedonism, which I do not use; and which he admits that I do not use. (GSM –)
Here again, as described in Chapter , Sidgwick, the man so heavily laden
with a finely tuned cognitive apparatus, thinks his way to a celebration of
Feeling, the “other” of his psyche, as the source of intrinsic value. He
does not, in his sensitive discrimination of the various pleasures, altogether
relinquish the appeal to their feeling tone. Indeed, as for the charge of
“tautology,” Sidgwick deems it “quite unwarrantable.” Even considering
only the presentation of the argument in the Methods, Book III, Chapter ,
Green’s case fails:
For the object of a great part of this argument is carefully to distinguish pleasure
or happiness – desirable Feeling – from other elements of conscious life, which I do not, in a reflective attitude, regard as ultimately desirable. To say that the
‘only thing that reason declares to be ultimately desirable is some kind of feeling,’
whatever it is, is not a tautology, nor the same thing as saying that it is some kind of conscious life. But again, Green’s statement of my view leaves out the further
determination of the kind of feeling which is given in the definition of Pleasure,
and which I fondly supposed that the reader would carry with him from Book II.
I there define Pleasure as ‘the kind of feeling which, when we experience it, we
apprehend as desirable or preferable’ – as ‘feeling that is preferable or desirable,
considered merely as feeling, and therefore from a point of view from which the
judgment of the sentient individual is final.’ The statement that Ultimate Good
is feeling of a certain quality, the quality being estimated by the judgement of
value implicitly passed on it by the sentient being at the time of feeling it, – this proposition is certainly not a tautology.
A similar want of understanding of my distinction between ‘desired’ and ‘desir-
able’ appears in Green’s subsequent arguments. . . . I do not argue that the reason why ‘no one denies pleasure to be a good’ is merely ‘because he is conscious
of desiring it,’ for I maintain that we all have experiences of desires directed to
wrong objects, and also to objects clearly not ultimately desirable – e.g. in resent-
ful impulse I desire another’s pain, but on reflection I do not judge this pain to
be desirable because I desire it, but because it is necessary for the determent or
reformation of the offender.
Again, I cannot conceive why ‘desirable’ should exclude the ‘actually desired,’
as is argued by Green. . . . Of course we should not apply the idea of ‘desirable’ as distinct from ‘desired,’ unless we had empirical evidence that we desire pleasures
to some extent out of proportion to their value as pleasures; but it does not follow
that feeling actually desired is not normally, in the main, feeling judged desirable
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when fruition comes: as overwhelming experience shows to be in fact the case.
(GSM –)
Thus, although Sidgwick was wary of identifying, in Benthamite fash-
ion, one particular mental quality of pleasure or pain, he did invoke the
family of feelings that counted as desirable consciousness. And this was
important, pointing to how he in effect used an “experience requirement”
(as noted in Chapter ) to show that his account of Good did not bump
up against the limits of thought as the Idealists claimed.
In fact, the upshot of this engagement with Green is to turn the tables,
to seek to recruit Green for the Sidgwickian camp:
With part of Green’s controversy against Mill – that which is directed against
Psychological Hedonism – I am almost entirely in accord – that is to say, I agree
with his conclusion that the object of conscious desire and voluntary aim is not
pleasure only. And I agree in the main with the explanation he gives of the preva-
lence of the opposite error – that is, that pleasure normally accompanies the
attainment of the desired object, and that hence it is easy to conceive this pleasure as the real object aimed at. But the same analysis which shows me that I do not
always aim at my own pleasure, shows me equally that I do not always aim at my
own satisfaction. I reject, in the one case as in the other, the conscious egoism
of the form in which human choice is conceived – except in the insignificant
sense that I am conscious that what I desire and aim at is desired and aimed
at by me – a tautological proposition. In fact, I find a considerable difficulty in
distinguishing what Green calls self-satisfaction from pleasure. And so far as I
can distinguish them, – so far as I can conceive the consciousness of attainment
of a desired object separated from pleasure, – it is something I do not desire.
(GSM )
As in the case of Bradley, Sidgwick cannot make out what Green really
means by “Self-satisfaction,” or whether he has any coherent notion of
it. And this is crucial, since Green seems to be offering up his Idealism
as a philosophical form of the reconciliation project, achieving through
the notions of “good” and “perfection” what Sidgwick had called in the
theistic postulate to deal with. But Sidgwick wonders whether, despite