still exclusively self-regarding, namely, their amount as compared with the exhaustion of the nervous power; the pleasures of music and of scenery are higher than those of stimulating drugs. But the superiority that makes a distinction of quality, that rises clearly and effectually above the swinish level, is the superiority of the gratifications that take our fellow beings along with us; such are the pleasures of affection, of benevolence, of duty. To have met opponents upon this ground alone would have been the proper undertaking for the object Mill had in view. It surprises me that he has not ventured upon such a mode of resolving pleasures. He says, "On a question which is the best worth having of two pleasures, or which of two modes of existence is the most grateful to the feelings, apart from its snored attributes and consequences, the judgment of those who are qualified by knowledge of both must be admitted to be final." Apart from moral attributes and consequences, I do not see a difference of quality at all; and, when these are taken into account, the difference is sufficient to call forth any amount of admiring preference. A man's actions are noble if they arrest misery or diffuse happiness around him; they are not noble if they are not directly or indirectly altruistic; his pleasures are essentially of the swinish type.
Still rasher, I think, is his off-hand formula of a happy life,[1] if he meant that this was to be a stone in the building of a utilitarian philosophy. As a side-remark upon some of the important conditions of happiness, it is interesting enough, but far from being rounded or precise. It was only to be expected that this utterance should have the same fate as Paley's chapter on "Happiness," namely, to be analyzed to death, and its mangled remains exposed as a memento of the weakness of the philosophy that it is intended to support. It was clearly his business, in conducting a defense of utility, to avoid all questionable suppositions, and to be content with what everybody would allow on the matter of happiness.
His third chapter, treating of the "Ultimate Sanction of the Principle of Utility," has been much caviled at in detail, but is, I consider, a very admirable statement of the genesis of moral sentiment under all the various influences that are necessarily at work. Here occurs that fine passage on the social feelings of mankind which ought, I think, to have been the framework or setting of the whole chapter. Perhaps he should have avoided the word "sanction," so rigidly confined by Austin and the jurists to the penalty or punishment of wrong.
The real stress of the book lies in the last chapter, which is well reasoned in every way, and free from damaging admissions. Under the guise of an inquiry into the foundations of justice, he raises the
- ↑ Happiness was "not a life of rapture; but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having, as the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing."
