"naturalistic" ethics is that it overlooks the fact that, even from the Darwinian point of view, the human _animal_ is a _human_ animal. It forgets that the sympathetic and social instincts, those which cause the individual to take the interests of others for his own and thereby to restrain his sheer brute self-assertiveness, are the highest achievements, the high-water mark of evolution. The theory urges a systematic relapse to lower and foregone stages of biological development. =2. Its Conception of "Power," "Efficiency," "Achievement" is Perverse.=--Compared with the gospel of abstinence, of inefficiency, preached by the self-denial school, there is an element of healthy reaction in any ethical system which stresses positive power, positive success, positive attainment. Goodness has been too much identified with practical feebleness and ineptitude; strength and solidity of accomplishment, with unscrupulousness. But power for the sake of power is as unreal an abstraction as self-denial for the sake of sacrifice, or self-restraint for the sake of the mere restraint. Erected into a central principle, it takes means for end--the fallacy of all materialism. It makes little of many of the most important and excellent _inherent ingredients_ of happiness in its eagerness to master _external conditions_ of happiness. Sensitive discrimination of complex and refined distinctions of worth, such as good taste, the resources of poetry and history, frank and varied social converse among intellectual equals, the humor of sympathetic contemplation of the spectacle of life, the capacity to extract happiness from solitude and society, from nature and from art:--all of these, as well as the more obvious virtues of sympathy and benevolence, are swept aside for one coarse undiscriminating ideal of external activity, measured by sheer quantity of external changes made and external results accumulated. Of such an ideal we may say, as Mill said, that the judge of good, of happiness, is the one who has experienced its various forms; and that as "no intelligent person would consent to be a fool" on account of the pleasures of the fool, so no man of cultivated spirit would consent to be a lover of "efficiency" and "power" for the sake of brute command of the external commodities of nature and man.