ONE:Meanwhile, he had a logical machine ready to hand, which could be used with terrible effect against the Platonic Ideas. Any of theseand there were a great numberthat could be brought under one of the last nine categories were at once deprived of all claim to independent existence. Take Equality, for instance. It cannot be discovered outside quantity, and quantity is always predicated of a substance. And the same is true of number, to the utter destruction of the Neo-Pythagorean theory which gave it a separate existence. Moreover, the categories served not only to generalise and combine, but also to specificate and divide. The idea of motion occurs in three of them; in quantity, where it means increase or diminution; in quality, where it means alteration, as from hot to cold, or vice versa; and in place, implying transport from one point to another. The Idea of Good, which stands at the very summit of Platos system, may be traced through all ten categories.242 Thus, the supposed unity and simplicity of such conceptions was shown to be an illusion. Platonism was, in truth, so inconsistent with the notions embodied in common language, that it could not but be condemned by a logic based on those notions.Utilitarianism agrees with the ancient hedonism in holding pleasure to be the sole good and pain the sole evil. Its adherents also, for the most part, admit that the desire of the one and the dread of the other are the sole motives to action; but, while making the end absolutely universal and impersonal, they make the motive into a momentary impulse, without any necessary relation to the future happiness of the agent himself. The good man does his duty because doing it gives him pleasure, or because the failure to do it would give him pain, at the moment; although he knows that a contrary course would save him from greater pain or win him greater pleasure hereafter. No accurate thinker would call this acting from a selfish or interested motive; nor does it agree with the teaching of Epicurus. Were all sensitive beings to be united in a single organism, then, on utilitarian principles, self-interest, interpreted in the sense of seeking its own preservation and pleasure, would be the only law that the individualised aggregate could rationally obey. But the good of each part would be rigorously subordinated to the good of the whole; and utilitarian morality desires that we should act as if this hypothesis were realised, at least in reference to our own particular interests. Now, the idea of humanity as forming such a consolidated whole is not Epicurean. It belongs to the philosophy which always reprobated pleasure, precisely because its pursuit is associated with the dereliction of public duty and with bitter rivalry for the possession of what, by its very nature, exists only in limited quantities, while the demand for it is unlimited or, at any rate, far exceeds the supply. According to the Stoics, there was only one way in which the individual could study his private425 interest without abandoning his position as a social being, and this was to find it exclusively in the practice of virtue.575 But virtue and public interest remained mere forms scantily supplemented by appeals to the traditional morality, until the idea of generalised happiness, of pleasure diffused through the whole community, came to fill them with substance and life.
