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choice between enjoyments other than those which belong to the moral constitution. "We are not in our theories to have, and not to have, at the same time, the law and the rewards of the moral intuition. We are not to make ethical pleasures to arise simply from the successful pursuit of other pleasures, and yet allow them themselves to be furtively included among these pleasures between which we are deciding. Many lines of action are obviously useful when accompanied with the gratification of our moral sensibilities, which are not so, when these as independent sources of good are left out of the calculation, as they must be in any honest evolution of a utilitarian theory.

Spencer, in his Data of Ethics, falls headlong into this error. He affirms that life is for the sake of pleasure, and therefore that " that conduct is good which subserves life." If we suppose perfection of character, he argues, to lead only to pain, then that perfection itself disappears. He herein overlooks two obvious relations. Virtue can not be separated from the satisfaction that virtue occasions. This is to cut into parts a living thing; this is to destroy the very notion, and of course if the notion becomes something other than what it is, the results will be correspondingly different. Nor does it follow that because satisfaction necessarily attaches to virtue, that that satisfaction, as a new pleasure, is the motive of virtue. A disinterested act as disinterested is peculiarly pleasurable. If one " is blessed in performing an act of mercy," he is blessed because he did it as an act of mercy in oversight of personal interest. Confusion at this point ought not to be any longer possible. The word pleasure is also plainly of a very generic order. There are the most marked differences in pleasures in kind as well as in degree. Yet if the utilitarian grants this, all his weights and measures are at once broken.