it places the end of morality in happiness. Yet Plato was
not a utilitarian, and would unhesitatingly have condemned
the theory of Mill. He {221} would have found it identi-
cal in principle with the Sophistic doctrine that pleasure is
the end of virtue. The only difference is that, whereas the
Sophists identified virtue with the pleasure of the individ-
ual, Mill makes it the pleasure of the community. That act
is right which leads to “the greatest happiness of the great-
est number.” In practice, of course, this makes a tremen-
dous difference. But the principle is equally objectionable
because, like the Sophistic theory, it founds morality upon
mere feeling, instead of upon reason, and because it places
the end of morality outside morality itself. Yet the formula
of Mill, that the end of morals is happiness, seems the same
as Plato’s formula. What is the difference?
The fact is that what Mill calls happiness Plato would have
called pleasure. Pleasure is the satisfaction of one’s desires,
whether they are noble or ignoble. Then what is happiness?
It can only be defined as the general harmonious well-being
of life. Only that man is happy whose soul is in the state
it ought to be in, only in fact the just, the good, and the
moral man. Happiness has nothing to do with pleasure.
If you could conceive an absolutely just and upright man,
who was yet weighed down with every possible misery and
disaster, in whose life pleasure had no part, such a man
would still be absolutely happy. Happiness is, therefore, in
Plato, merely another name for thesummum bonum. In
saying that thesummum bonumis happiness, Plato is not
telling us anything about it. He is merely giving it a new
name. And we are still left to enquire: what is thesummum
bonum? what is happiness?Plato’s answer, as indeed his whole ethics, is but {222}
an application of the theory of Ideas. But here we can
distinguish two different and, to some extent, inconsistent
strains of thought, which exist side by side in Plato, and
perpetually struggle for the mastery. Both views depend
upon the theory of Ideas. In the first place, the Idea, in
Plato’s philosophy, is the sole reality. The object of sense
is unreal, and merely clogs and dims the soul’s vision of the
Ideas. Matter is that which obstructs the free activity of the
Idea. Sense-objects hide the Idea from our view. Therefore
the world of sense is wholly evil. True virtue must consist
in flying from the world of sense, in retiring from the affairs
of the world, and even from the beauty of the senses, into
the calm of philosophic contemplation. And if this were all,
philosophy, the knowledge of the Ideas, would be the sole
constituent of thesummum bonum. But it is possible to
regard sense-objects in another light. They are, after all,
copies of the Ideas. They are therefore a manifestation and
revelation of the ideal world. Hence Plato is compelled by
this thought to allow a certain value to the world of sense,
its affairs, and its beauty.The result of this inconsistency is, at any rate, that Plato
remains broad and human. He does not, on the one hand,
preach a purely selfish retirement into philosophy, or a nar-
row ascetic ideal. He does not, on the other hand, adopt
a low utilitarian view of life, allowing value only to that
which is “practical.” He remains true to the Greek ideal
of life as a harmonious play of all the faculties, in which
no one part of man is over-developed at the expense of the