=44.= Mill, then, has nothing better to say for himself than this. His two fundamental propositions are, in his own words, ‘that to think of an object as desirable (unless for the sake of its consequences), and to think of it as pleasant, are one and the same thing; and that to desire anything except in proportion as the idea of it is pleasant, is a physical and metaphysical impossibility[16].’ Both of these statements are, we have seen, merely supported by fallacies. The first seems to rest on the naturalistic fallacy; the second rests partly on this, partly on the fallacy of confusing ends and means, and partly on the fallacy of confusing a pleasant thought with the thought of a pleasure. His very language shews this. For that the idea of a thing is pleasant, in his second clause, is obviously meant to be the same fact which he denotes by ‘thinking of it as pleasant,’ in his first. [16] p. 58. Accordingly, Mill’s arguments for the proposition that pleasure is the sole good, and our refutation of those arguments, may be summed up as follows: First of all, he takes ‘the desirable,’ which he uses as a synonym for ‘the good,’ to _mean_ what _can_ be desired. The test, again, of what can be desired, is, according to him, what actually is desired: if, therefore, he says, we can find some one thing which is always and alone desired, that thing will necessarily be the only thing that is desirable, the only thing that is good as an end. In this argument the naturalistic fallacy is plainly involved. That fallacy, I explained, consists in the contention that good _means_ nothing but some simple or complex notion, that can be defined in terms of natural qualities. In Mill’s case, good is thus supposed to _mean_ simply what is desired; and what is desired is something which can thus be defined in natural terms. Mill tells us that we ought to desire something (an ethical proposition), because we actually do desire it; but if his contention that ‘I ought to desire’ means nothing but ‘I do desire’ were true, then he is only entitled to say, ‘We do desire so and so, because we do desire it’; and that is not an ethical proposition at all; it is a mere tautology. The whole object of Mill’s book is to help us to discover what we ought to do; but, in fact, by attempting to define the meaning of this ‘ought,’ he has completely debarred himself from ever fulfilling that object: he has confined himself to telling us what we do do.