effort to improve the character of others as well as our own; and if this extension of their meaning be well understood, and it is also understood that the development or perfection of character implies certain conditions of material comfort and the gratification, within reasonable limits, of our appetitive nature, there ought to be no objection on the part of the moralist to their employment for the purpose of designating the test of right conduct; and, any way, they are useful as supplementing, correcting, and elevating the associations attached to the more commonly employed terms, pleasure and happiness.  But are there no terms by which the somewhat exclusive associations connected with the two sets of phrases already examined may be avoided?  I venture to suggest that such terms may be found by reverting to the old, but now usually discarded, expressions ‘welfare’ and ‘well-being.’  These words, it seems to me, do not primarily suggest material prosperity, like happiness, nor the gratification of the lower parts of our nature, like pleasure, nor the exclusive development of the higher parts of our nature, like perfection, but cover the whole ground of healthy human activity and the conditions which are favourable to it.  Corresponding, too, almost exactly with the [Greek:  eudaimonia] of Aristotle, they have the advantage of venerable historic associations.  Lastly, they seem to have less of a personal and more of a social reference than any of the other terms employed.  We speak, I think, more naturally of the well-being or welfare of society, than of the happiness, pleasure, or perfection of society.  I cannot, therefore, but think that the moralist would be wise in at least trying the experiment of recurring to these terms in place of those which, in recent systems of ethics, have usually superseded them.  If it be said that they are vague, and that different people will attach different meanings to them, according to their own prepossessions and their own theories of life, I can only reply that this objection applies with at least equal force to any of the other terms which we have passed in review.  And, if it be said that our conceptions of well-being and welfare are not fixed, but that our ideas of the nature and proper proportions of their constituents are undergoing constant modification and growth, I may ask if this is less the case with regard to happiness, or the sum of pleasures, or the balance of pleasures over pains, or the perfection or due development of human character, all of which expressions, indeed, when properly qualified and explained, I acknowledge to be the equivalents of those for which I have stated a preference.  And here occurs a difficulty with respect to all these expressions and ideas.  If their meaning or content is not fixed, and specially if they are undergoing a constant change, in the way of growth, with the progress of reason and society, how can we employ them as a test of morality, which is itself also a variable conception?  Surely this is to make one indefinite idea the gauge of another indefinite idea.  The answer to this question will, I trust, bring out clearly the nature of a moral test, as well as the different modes of its application.