44 PEOF. H. SID G WICK : " IDIOPSYCHOLOGICAL ETHICS."

as a duel between resentment and compassion, or between love of ease and love of gain, it would not be 'fought out in the lists so marked out ; since still higher motives would come in in each case, regard for justice and social well-being on the side of resentment, regard for health and ultimate efficiency for work on the side of love of ease ; and that it would be the intervention of these higher motives that would decide the struggle so far as it was decided rightly and as we should approve. This certainly is what would happen in my own case, if the supposed conflict were at all serious and its decision deliberate ; and it is for this reason that such a scale as Dr. Martineau has drawn up, of motives, arranged according to their moral rank, can never, in my view, have more than a very subordinate ethical importance. It may serve to indicate in a rough and general way the kinds of desires which it is ordinarily best to encourage and indulge, in comparison with other kinds which are liable to compete and collide with them ; arid we might perhaps settle, by means of it, some of the comparatively trifling conflicts of motive which the varying and complex play of needs, habits, interests, and their accompanying emotions continu- ally brings forth in our daily life. But if a serious question of conduct is raised, I cannot conceive myself deciding it morally by any comparison of motives below the highest : the case must, as I have elsewhere said, 1 be "carried up" for decision " into the court " of the motive which I regard as supreme i.e., the desire to promote universal good, understood as happiness of sentient beings generally. Thus the comparison ultimately decisive on the particular question raised would inevitably be not a comparison between the motives primarily conflicting, but between the effects of the different lines of conduct to which they respectively prompt, considered in relation to whatever we regard as the ultimate end of reasonable action. And this, I conceive, is the course which moral reflection will naturally take in the case not only of utilitarians, but of all who follow Butler in regarding our passions and propensions as forming naturally a " system or constitution," in which the ends of lower im- pulses are subordinate as means to the ends of certain governing motives, or are comprehended as parts in these larger ends. So far as any view of this kind is taken, any tabulation of the moral rank of motives other than the governing ones can, at best, have only a quite subordinate interest : it cannot possibly furnish a method of dealing with the fundamental problems of ethical construction. 1 Methods of Ethics, bk. iii., cli. xii., p. 3.