reason for making the utmost of each possibility of happiness as it presents itself.1

It may be added that a recognition of the fugitive character of life is the basis of a peculiar sentiment towards it, which sentiment in a sense increases its worth to us. It awakens within us that elegiac mood which, though containing an element of sadness, is not on the whole a painful condition of mind. The thought of the rapid departure of life's various good, sets, so to speak, this good in a dark framework which only serves to throw into clearer We think how soon our dear light its beauty and worth. ones, our books, our favourite bits of scenery, will exist no longer for us, and we come back from the chilling thought only to hold and cherish more tenaciously the reality which is still ours. In these reflections, too, we place ourselves in imagination at the end of life, from which point we seem to look back and bid farewell to our checkered yet muchloved abode. Hence the feeling of elegiac tenderness which these reflections bring us, and which, mingling with our instinctive fondness for life so far as it is good, makes it yet more precious by adding to it the touch of sacredness.

It would thus appear that the full recognition of the evanescence of life by no means robs this of its worth, but rather enhances in different ways the value of each of its successive stages.

It is worth adding that, even if the evanescence of the individual life must-supposing faith in a future state to be wanting-continue to exert a depressing influence, this ill

Yet this

1 It is evident that reflection on the close of life is fitted to beget the habit of conceiving oneself as called on to part from it, and in this way to prepare one actually to relinquish it at the appointed hour. valuable result does not, I imagine, involve a slackening of our hold of life so long as it is still offered us as something fairly certain.

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effect may be greatly reduced by that identification of personal with collective human aims to which reference has already been made. Though I have admitted that the thought of an endless succession of brief lives is not fitted to take the place, in respect of sustaining force, of the conception of eternal individual existences, I would by no means assign a mean rank to the former idea. On the contrary, even if its influence on the human mind may have been exaggerated during the first enthusiastic stage of its advocacy, I conceive that it is a grand, elevating, and highly consolatory thought. To cultivate the fullest and widest interest in all lines of worthy human activity, to accustom ourselves to the largest anticipations of human welfare, to make the growing happiness of the countless succession of human generations an object of aspiration, and, so far as possible even of individual effort-this, I imagine, is one of the surest ways of rising out of the state of dejection into which the thought of the end of individual life is apt to cast us. In this way the consciousness of our fleeting part in the world's drama grows faint, our narrow prison expands, and our wills find ample satisfaction when desire and ideal purpose swell to the full limits of our imagination.

More especially this fusion of individual ends with the great collective ends of the race will serve to sustain our interest in the world when our own individual life is growing feeble. The man who limits his view to his own personal good, must plainly lose much of the relish for life as its end approaches. Even if he has learnt to seek certain objects as, for example, art—as ends in themselves, yet if he has not distinctly connected these with the happiness of others he will be apt to slacken his hold on them as he

reflects that they will soon cease to exist for him. On the other hand, the man who has accustomed himself to think of and to desire the good of others will keep this part of life's worth unimpaired and fresh even when his own individual part in these aims draws to a close.

Let us now glance back in order to see how far we have already travelled in our somewhat tortuous path of inquiry. We have found that the idea of happiness as of something which a wise man carves out by his own voluntary exertions, and sets up as his ideal of life-good, must be taken as tending to a clear and considerable surplus of pleasure. And this being so, our first problem is wholly changed. It is no longer a question of a given number of susceptibilities with a wholly indefinite number of external stimuli; we have no longer to calculate the net value of an indeterminate series of imperfectly commensurable elements which occur, we know not with what frequency, or in what order; it is a question whether by voluntary endeavour we are able to transform our primitive world or the arrangement of things into the midst of which the accident of our birth has cast us, substituting for this unsolicited order a new order of circumstances and relations, external and internal, bearing the unmistakeable stamp of a positive value. In other words, our present question is how far we are capable of dominating the primal conditions of our emotional experience, so as to extract from the mingled possibilities of life, a moderate, if not a goodly, heap of treasure.

The idea of happiness as an abiding fund of positive enjoyment has, I think, shown itself to be an intelligible and consistent idea. This result has already carried us far away from pessimism, which makes happiness unthinkable

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by identifying misery with will. And here, by the way, it may be well to note the curious fact that, whereas the pessimist finds his world-misery rooted in will, this same will has supplied us with the one possible basis of a clear and consistent conception of a life which must satisfy by a sure preponderance of pleasure. Yet it is not enough to frame an intelligible idea of a life which involves happiWe must inquire whether such an idea is fitted to be actually realised. To this next step of our inquiry we may proceed in the following chapter.

ness.

NOTE TO CHAPTER XI.

Difference of Quality in Pleasure.

Ir may be well to point out the relation of our idea of happiness to that which reposes on differences of quality among pleasures. According to this idea, certain pleasures are superior to others in such a way that no quantity of an inferior order could be taken as an equivalent for them. To quote Hutcheson, who has laid emphasis on this idea: We have an immediate sense of a dignity, a perfection, or beatifick quality, in some kinds [of pleasures] which no intensity of the lower kinds can equal, were they also as lasting as we could wish.'1 The authority to determine this point consists of the best judges who have full experience with their tastes or senses and appetites in a natural, vigorous state.'

As by Hutcheson, so by its modern supporters in general, the idea of difference of quality or kind in pleasures seems to be based exclusively on the immediate verdict of consciousness. The only other arguments in favour of it known to me, are those of Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, book x. chap. v.2). These turn on Aristotle's peculiar conception of pleasure as the perfection of an active function,3 which conception appears to involve the partial identification of the two as but different sides of one and the same reality. If it be admitted that pleasure perfects activity, and that things can only be perfected by other things homogeneous with themselves,

1 'System of Moral Philosophy,' book i. chap. vii. Mill seems to have followed Hutcheson in his presentation of the idea of the qualitative differences of pleasure.

2 These arguments are classified by Sir Alexander Grant ('The Nicomachean Ethics,' vol. ii. p. 328).

3 Sir A. Grant remarks that the active function (évépyeta) here perfected is, contrary to Aristotle's usual custom, regarded as purely objective (op. cit. i. 244).

The pleasure is in time coincident with the act, and in its own nature is so incapable of any distinction from it, as to render it open to question whether pleasure and action ought not to be identified' ('The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle,' translated by Robert Williams, p. 306).