Note 369 — Chapter VIII · PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN RATIONALISM

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” [a logical law] but the law of right and wrong [an ethical law]. As a proof of the subordination of the facts of conduct to the facts of aesthetics, we may take the words on p. 348 where aesthetic excellence is said to be “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.