GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

6l8 ETHICS AND POLITICS: THE MODERNS
a challenge to keep our senses alert, our faculties trained,
our appetite for experience fresh and undullcd, our spirits
keen and unsophisticated. Good and bad, right and
wrong, are objective principles in the universe (this, by
the way, as we shall see later, is by no means the general
view of German Fascism) ; there is a moral law and it is
absolute. It is only an unspoiled spirit that can discern
these principles, and a disciplined nature that can live
in accordance with the dictates of the moral law. Hence
arises the duty of keeping the spirit bright and the passions
under control. Happiness is a good, but it is not the
supreme good; the value of wealth has been over-rated,
and when over-rated it can exercise a corrupting influence
over the minds and spirits of those who pursue it. It is the
ethical fallacy of thinking happiness the one supreme
good that is responsible for the democratic fallacies that all
men are equal, and that it is the State's business to make
these equals happy; it is the psychological fallacy that the
pocket is the rudder that steers human nature that is responsible
for the Marxist fallacy that economic drciiinstanc a
forces determine the movements of history and the beliefs
of men's minds* 1 The Marxist or realist interpretation of
history is, indeed, the result of the misplaced application
to life of the habit of abstraction and rationalization
which we have seen to be one of the characteristics of
scientific method. Ifwe must talk in tehns ofdetermination,
let us realize that in the long run the spiritual determines
the material. In other words* it is man's sense of values,
his principles of morality, and his insight into the nature
of right and wrong, which determines the events of history
and the political structure of society.
To the reader who feels disposed to criticize this
account of the fascist temper of mind on the score of
that it is difficult to find a more exact
vagueness, I plead
statement. The following quotation from the volume on
Fascism in the Home University Library, by Major J. S.
> See Chapter XVII, pp. 666-672, for an Account of the* Marxist
doctrines*