Now what is this ‘reconciliation of duty and self-interest,’ which Divine Sanctions could ensure? It would consist in the mere fact that the same conduct which produced the greatest possible happiness of the greatest number would always also produce the greatest possible happiness of the agent. If this were the case (and our empirical knowledge shews that it is not the case in this world), ‘morality’ would, Prof. Sidgwick thinks, be ‘completely rational’: we should avoid ‘an ultimate and fundamental contradiction in our apparent intuitions of what is Reasonable in conduct.’ That is to say, we should avoid the necessity of thinking that it is as manifest an obligation to secure our own greatest Happiness (maxim of Prudence), as to secure the greatest Happiness on the whole (maxim of Benevolence). But it is perfectly obvious we should not. Prof. Sidgwick here commits the characteristic fallacy of Empiricism--the fallacy of thinking that an alteration in _facts_ could make a contradiction cease to be a contradiction. That a single man’s happiness should be _the sole good_, and that also everybody’s happiness should be _the sole good_, is a contradiction which cannot be solved by the assumption that the same conduct will secure both: it would be equally contradictory, however certain we were that that assumption was justified. Prof. Sidgwick strains at a gnat and swallows a camel. He thinks the Divine Omnipotence must be called into play to secure that what gives other people pleasure should also give it to him--that only so can Ethics be made rational; while he overlooks the fact that even this exercise of Divine Omnipotence would leave in Ethics a contradiction, in comparison with which his difficulty is a trifle--a contradiction, which would reduce all Ethics to mere nonsense, and before which the Divine Omnipotence must be powerless to all eternity. That _each_ man’s happiness should be the _sole good_, which we have seen to be the principle of Egoism, is in itself a contradiction: and that it should also be true that the Happiness of all is the _sole good_, which is the principle of Universalistic Hedonism, would introduce another contradiction. And that these propositions should all be true might well be called ‘the profoundest problem in Ethics’: it would be a problem necessarily insoluble. But they _cannot_ all be true, and there is no reason, but confusion, for the supposition that they are. Prof. Sidgwick confuses this contradiction with the mere fact (in which there is no contradiction) that our own greatest happiness and that of all do not seem always attainable by the same means. This fact, if Happiness were the sole good, would indeed be of some importance; and, on any view, similar facts are of importance. But they are nothing but instances of the one important fact that in this world the quantity of good which is attainable is ridiculously small compared to that which is imaginable.