Next I have to discuss a principle which is advocated as an expression of the morally reasonable, on the ground of having a sort of analogy to several maxims or axioms of the intellectual world. It used to be said that justice is like a square; or that the rightness of an action consists in its conformity to certain eternal proportions impressed upon the world by God. I take one more modern form of these principles as a type of them all. Bentham said, “One is only to count for one,” and it is a mere amplification of this when Mr. Sidgwick maintains, if I understand him, that it is objectively reasonable not to prefer my own interest or pleasure simply because it is my own, to that of some one else. This principle seems to me a commendable expression of moral judgment, and I do not think that it is needless or empty. There is a famous passage in Middlemarch where the heroine, in a matter which acutely touches her own feelings, thinks to herself, “Now how should I act if I could compel my own pain to be silent, and merely consider what is best for the lives of all the persons concerned in the situation?” That I suppose is a concrete rendering of what this principle means. But if we look closer, we see its weak side. It is negative, and consequently abstract. You are not to heed your own feelings unless they are such that you would heed them if they were some one’s else in the same circumstances. This amounts to no more than saying, “We believe there is always, under all circumstances, a right course.” It is strictly parallel to the theoretical principles of Uniformity or Causation. “We believe that there is an explanation for everything; that nothing changes without some reason.” These are useful maxims if they make us look for the explanation, and so the other is a useful maxim, if it makes us look for the right course. But it really falls between two stools. It is not capable, as intellectual theorems are, of accurate development and application by measurement and analysis. Yet on the other hand it makes no special appeal to any special content, or tendency of reasonableness embodied in definite ends. It is neither theoretically fertile, nor is it a description of a practical influence. It is a well-known phenomenon that those who suggest maxims or moral axioms of this kind as defining moral reasonableness are apt to be reduced to assuming a particular impulse, told off to assist or obey the reason. Such are Plato’s “Spirited” element in the soul, Kant’s reverence, Mr. Sidgwick’s general desire to do what is reasonable. This seems to me to be creating a rule which has no positive content, and therefore has not the character of a human purpose, and then imagining an impulse to obey it the nature of which is not accounted for in reference to any plan of life, but must simply be propounded as an isolated fact.