from life, and so far as it results in the heightening of life. But in itself, if and so far as we separate it by an abstraction or find it apart from its good qualities, it is not good, it is in no sense an end in itself.
Here we might cease, but further elucidations will perhaps not be superfluous.
Life is an end in itself. It is true that life implies pleasure. Pessimism notwithstanding, it implies, speaking generally, a surplus of pleasure; and I am not called upon to deny (though I certainly neither assert nor admit it) that higher life means always a greater surplus.
If so, have we come back to Hedonism? Since pleasure and life are inseparable, can we say that to aim at the realization of life is to aim at pleasure? No, in the sense of making it an object, it is not to aim at pleasure; and this distinction is a vital difference, which we must never slur. Function carries pleasure with it as its psychical accompaniment, but what determines, makes and is good or bad, is in the end function. Function, moreover, is something comparatively definite. It gives something you can aim at, something you can do. Not so the pleasure. Further, so far as function and pleasure are separable objects of choice, we must, if we are moral, choose the former. If they are inseparable, are one whole, why are we to aim at the indefinite side, at the subjective psychical sequent and accompaniment, when we have an objective act which we can see before us and perform, and which is the prius of the feeling? It is the act carries with it the pleasure, not the pleasure the act.
‘Yes, but,’ it will be said, ‘we want more pleasure, more than we get with present function; and we will alter the function to get the pleasure.’ Then you must take one of these three positions. You (a) wholly reject the idea that one function is in itself higher than another; or, while believing in higher and lower functions, you say (b) pleasure is separable, or (c) inseparable from the higher.
On the first supposition (a) you break at once with common morality, which does not believe that lower and higher stand for mere means to less or more pleasure. And (b) on the second you are confessedly immoral; for, while believing in a higher, you propose to sacrifice it to pleasure. ‘Let us have pleasure, even at the cost of function’ is not a moral point of view.[1]
- ↑ Nor can you reconcile yourself to common morality by saying, ‘But we will only increase the pleasure.’ For (1) either the increase of pleasure does issue in the heightening of function, and will be good in this sense and not in yours; or else (2), as we have seen, if pleasure neither raises nor lowers function, then common opinion considers it neither desirable nor undesirable.
