in this way Mr. Russell and Mr. Moore conceive things to be dead good and dead bad.  It is such a view, rather than the naturalistic one, that renders reasoning and self-criticism impossible in morals; for wrong desires, and false opinions as to value, are conceivable only because a point of reference or criterion is available to prove them such.  If no point of reference and no criterion were admitted to be relevant, nothing but physical stress could give to one assertion of value greater force than to another.  The shouting moralist no doubt has his place, but not in philosophy.

That good is not an intrinsic or primary quality, but relative and adventitious, is clearly betrayed by Mr. Russell’s own way of arguing, whenever he approaches some concrete ethical question.  For instance, to show that the good is not pleasure, he can avowedly do nothing but appeal “to ethical judgments with which almost every one would agree.”  He repeats, in effect, Plato’s argument about the life of the oyster, having pleasure with no knowledge.  Imagine such mindless pleasure, as intense and prolonged as you please, and would you choose it?  Is it your good?  Here the British reader, like the blushing Greek youth, is expected to answer instinctively, No!  It is an argumentum ad hominem (and there can be no other kind of argument in ethics); but the man who gives the required answer does so not because the answer is self-evident, which it is not, but because he is the required sort of man.  He is shocked at the idea of resembling an oyster.  Yet changeless pleasure, without memory or reflection, without the wearisome intermixture of arbitrary images, is just what the mystic, the voluptuary, and perhaps the oyster find to be good.  Ideas, in their origin, are probably signals of alarm; and the distress which they marked in the beginning always clings to them in some measure, and causes many a soul, far more profound than that of the young Protarchus or of the British reader, to long for them to cease altogether.  Such a radical hedonism is indeed inhuman; it undermines all conventional ambitions, and is not a possible foundation for political or artistic life.  But that is all we can say against it.  Our humanity cannot annul the incommensurable sorts of good that may be pursued in the world, though it cannot itself pursue them.  The impossibility which people labour under of being satisfied with pure pleasure as a goal is due to their want of imagination, or rather to their being dominated by an imagination which is exclusively human.

The author’s estrangement from reality reappears in his treatment of egoism, and most of all in his “Free Man’s Religion.”  Egoism, he thinks, is untenable because “if I am right in thinking that my good is the only good, then every one else is mistaken unless he admits that my good, not his, is the only good.”  “Most people ... would admit that it is better two people’s desires should be satisfied than only one person’s....