3. The use of education and law to bring about this identity, presupposes that we already have the _ideal_ of the identity as something desirable to realize--it takes for granted the very thing to be proved. Why should it occur to men to use the private influence of opinion and education, and the public influences of law and penalty to identify private welfare with public, unless they were already convinced that general welfare was the end of conduct, the one desirable thing? What the hedonist has to do is to show how, from the end of private happiness, we may get to the end of general happiness. What Bentham and Mill do show is, that if we take general happiness as the end, we may and do use education and law to bring about an identity of personal and general pleasures. This may go undoubted, but the question how we get the general happiness as the end, the good, remains unanswered. Nor is this all. The conception of general happiness, taken by itself, has all the abstractness, vagueness and uncertainty of that of personal happiness, multiplied indefinitely by the greater number of persons introduced. To calculate the effects of actions upon the general happiness--when happiness is interpreted as a state of feeling--is an impossibility. And thus it is that when one is speaking of pleasures one is really thinking of welfare, or well-being, or satisfied and progressive human lives. Happiness is considered as it would be, if determined by certain active and well defined interests, and thus the hedonistic theory, while contradicting itself, gets apparently all the support of an opposed theory. Universalistic hedonism thus, more or less expressly, takes for granted a social order, or community of persons, of which the agent is simply one member like any other. This is the ideal which it proposes to realize. In this way--although at the cost of logical suicide--the ideal gets a content and a definiteness upon which it is possible to base judgments.