Rule and end in morals / by John H. Muirhead.

  • Muirhead, John H. (John Henry), 1855-1940.
Date:
1932
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Rule and end in morals / by John H. Muirhead. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    separate it from all connexion with naturalistic interpretations of that in which the teAos or end consists. Green’s reinterpretation of the classical scheme of the Nicomachean 'Ethics in terms of modern life in the Prolegomena to Ethics is, I suppose, by this time itself a classic and does not here require to be recalled in detail. The essence of it is that the upward nisus in human life comes from the latent sense of the values inherent in all men, what man as man ‘has it in him to become’, and particularly the values known as virtues or excellences that attach to him as an individual person. But the writer who drank in these days most deeply of the idealistic spirit at its source was Bernard Bosanquet, whose chief merit has always seemed to me to be the clearness with which he grasped, and the con¬ sistency with which he sought to apply, the Platonic doctrine that logic is ‘the supreme law or nature of experience, the impulse towards unity and coherence ... by which every fragment yearns towards the whole to which it belongs’; that in this way ‘love is the mainspring of logic’; and that ‘practice, if the term has a distinctive sense at all, is a sub¬ ordinate feature of its movement’.1 With this revival the main question again came to be, as it was to Plato and Aristotle, that of the principle of Good—the definition of that which is inherently lovable and makes life worth living, as the criterion of the goodness or 1 Principle of Individuality and Value, pp. 340-1.