This is, in particular, the case with John Stuart Mill, the
high-minded representative of the Utilitarian philosophy in the middle
of last century. "In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth," he says,
"we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one
would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute
the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality."[1]
[Footnote 1: Utilitarianism, 9th ed., pp. 24, 25.]
No doubt Mill was a practical reformer as well as a philosophical
thinker, and he wished on certain special points to revise the
accepted code. He says that "the received code of ethics is by no
means of divine right, that mankind has still much to learn as to the
effects of actions on the general happiness."[1] He would even take
this point--the modifiability of the ordinary moral code--as a sort
of test question distinguishing his own system from that of the
intuitional moralists; and in one place he says that "the contest
between the morality which appeals to an external standard, and
that which grounds itself on internal conviction, is the contest
of progressive morality against stationary--of reason and argument
against the deification of mere opinion and habit. The doctrine that
the existing order of things is the natural order, and that, being
natural, all innovation upon it is criminal, is as vicious in morals
as it is now at last admitted to be in physics and in society and
government.
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