Obligation, in this system, remains internal and vital. Plato
attributes a single vital direction and a single moral source to the
cosmos. This is what determines and narrows the scope of the true
good; for the true good is that relevant to nature. Plato would not
have been a dogmatic moralist, had he not been a theist.]
But perhaps what suggests this hypostasis of good is rather the fact
that what others find good, or what we ourselves have found good in
moods with which we retain no sympathy, is sometimes pronounced by us
to be bad; and far from inferring from this diversity of experience
that the present good, like the others, corresponds to a particular
attitude or interest of ours, and is dependent upon it, Mr. Russell
and Mr. Moore infer instead that the presence of the good must be
independent of all interests, attitudes, and opinions. They imagine
that the truth of a proposition attributing a certain relative quality
to an object contradicts the truth of another proposition, attributing
to the same object an opposite relative quality. Thus if a man here
and another man at the antipodes call opposite directions up, "only
one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is
right."
To protect the belated innocence of this state of mind, Mr.
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