We seem, then, forced to conclude that there is no scientific short-cut to the ascertainment of the right means to the individual’s happiness: every attempt to find a ‘high priori road’ to this goal brings us back inevitably to the empirical method. For instead of a clear principle universally valid, we only get at best a vague and general rule, based on considerations which it is important not to overlook, but the relative value of which we can only estimate by careful observation and comparison of individual experience. Whatever uncertainty besets these processes must necessarily extend to all our reasonings about happiness. I have no wish to exaggerate these uncertainties, feeling that we must all continue to seek happiness for ourselves and for others, in whatever obscurity we may have to grope after it: but there is nothing gained by underrating them, and it is idle to argue as if they did not exist.
[131] “It should seem that a due concern about our own interest or happiness, and a reasonable endeavour to secure and promote it, ... is virtue, and the contrary behaviour faulty and blamable.” Butler (in the Dissertation _Of the Nature of Virtue_ appended to the _Analogy_).
[132] This view is suggested by Mr. Herbert Spencer’s statement--in a letter to J. S. Mill, published in Mr. Bain’s _Mental and Moral Science_; and partially reprinted in Mr. Spencer’s _Data of Ethics_, chap. iv. § 21--that “it is the business of moral science to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of existence, what kinds of actions necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness,” and that when it has done this, “its deductions are to be recognised as laws of conduct; and are to be conformed to irrespective of a direct estimate of happiness or misery.” I ought, however, to say that Mr. Spencer has made it clear in his latest treatise that the only cogent deductions of this kind which he conceives to be possible relate to the behaviour not of men here and now, but of ideal men living in an ideal society, and living under conditions so unlike those of actual humanity that all their actions produce “pleasure unalloyed with pain anywhere” (_Data of Ethics_, § 101). The laws of conduct in this Utopia constitute, in Mr. Spencer’s view, the subject-matter of “Absolute Ethics”; which he distinguishes from the “Relative Ethics” that concerns itself with the conduct of the imperfect men who live under the present imperfect social conditions, and of which the method is, as he admits, to a great extent “necessarily empirical” (_Data of Ethics_, § 108). How far such a system as Mr. Spencer calls Absolute Ethics can be rationally constructed, and how far its construction would be practically useful, I shall consider in a later part of this treatise (Book iv. chap. iv.), when I come to deal with the method of Universalistic Hedonism: at present I am only concerned with the question how far any deductive Ethics is capable of furnishing practical guidance to an individual seeking his own greatest happiness here and now.