There the moral feeling of western Christendom touches the feeling of the heathen Hindu, as is shown in a somewhat strange story of a maiden who renounces her own everlasting blessedness for the salvation of the rest of the world; as also that of a positivist thinker like Mill when he declares sooner than bow in prayer before a being not truly good, “to hell he will go.” I knew a Catholic priest who, on account of this utterance of Mill’s, voted for him at the parliamentary election.] Whoever, as I have said, has once accepted the view that nothing can please except in so far as it is really good, nothing displease, except in so far as it is really bad, is on a way which, if consistently followed, must lead him to subjectivism. This is evident as soon as it is admitted (and at first sight, it is true, it may be denied) that opposite tastes, here desire, there dislike, may be associated with the same sense phenomenon. One might, in defence, argue that here, in spite of the similarity of the external stimulus the corresponding subjective idea may have an essentially different content. But such a view refutes itself in those cases where we ourselves repeatedly experience the same phenomenon, and, in consequence of a further development in age or by reason of a changed habit (cf. text 25, p. 16) thereby experience a different feeling, dislike for desire, or desire for dislike. There remains, then, no doubt, that as a fact the feelings may take an opposed attitude towards the same phenomenon: and again, in the case where ideas instinctively repel us, while at the same time arousing within us a pleasure of a higher kind (cf. note 32, p. 92), what has been said is also clearly evident.
Finally, we should expect from one who thinks that every act of simple pleasure is right, and that one act never contradicts another, a similar doctrine in respect of the act of choosing. But the reverse is here so obvious that the advocates of this view have in striking contrast always asserted in the most definite manner that different individuals have preferences opposite in character, and that one is right, the other wrong.
Glancing back from the disciples of Aristotle in the Middle Ages to the master himself, we find his teaching appears to be a different one. Aristotle recognizes a right and a wrong kind of desire (Ὄρεξις ὀρθᾐ καἰ οὐκ οὐκ ὀρθή) and that what is desired (ὀρεκτόν) is not always the good. (_De Anima_, iii. 10.) In the same way he affirms in respect of pleasure (ἡδονή) in the _Nicomachian Ethics_ that not every pleasure is good; there is a pleasure in the bad, which is itself bad (_Nic. Eth._ x. 2). In his _Metaphysics_ he distinguishes between a lower and a higher kind of desire (ἐπιθμία and βούλησις); whatever is desired by the higher kind for its own sake is truly good (_Metaph._ Δ 7, p. 1072 a. 28). A certain approach to the right view seems already to have been reached here. It is of special interest (a point I have only discovered later) that Aristotle has suggested an analogy between ethical subjectivism and the logical subjectivism of Protagoras, and equally repudiates both (_Metaph._ Κ 6, p. 1062 b. 16, and 1063 a. 5). On the other hand it would appear from the lines immediately following as though Aristotle had fallen into the very obvious temptation of believing that we can know the good as good, independent of the excitation of the emotions. (_Metaph._ 29; cf. _De Anima_, iii. 9 and 10.)