should say, the realization of a maximum of pleasure in the ‘whole sentient creation’ (which stands, I suppose, for what particular animal organisms are now and are to be hereafter), is nothing but a wild and impossible fiction.
Happiness, in the sense of ‘as much as you can,’ we saw, is never and nowhere realised; or, if any one prefers it, is realized everywhere and without any drawback. In both cases, as a something set to be gained, it has no signification. Happiness, in the meaning of a maximum of pleasure, can never be reached; and what is the sense of trying to reach the impossible? Happiness, in the meaning of always a little more and always a little less, is the stone of Sisyphus and the vessel of the Danaides—it is not heaven, but hell. Whether we try for it or not, we always have got a little more and a little less[1] (than we might have), and never at any time, however much we try for it, can we have a little more or a little less than we have got.
But theoretical considerations of this sort are likely neither to be understood nor regarded. Our morality, we shall hear, ‘is a practical matter.’ And I should have thought it indeed a practical consideration, whether our chief good be realizable or no, whether it be πρακτὸν καὶ κτητὸν ἀνθρώπῳ, or exist only in the heads of certain theorists. But let this pass. We can avoid, I dare say, practical inconvenience, by not meaning what we say or saying what we mean.
Whatever, then, we may think about the possibility of the actual existence of the end, and the satisfactoriness (or otherwise) of aiming at the impossible and unmeaning, at all events our moral law and precept is clear, Increase the pleasure, i.e. multiply in number, and intensify in quality, the pleasurable feelings of sentient beings, and do the opposite by their pains.
We have already noticed, but it may not be amiss to call attention once more to the fact, that a doctrine of this sort is
- ↑ To define happiness as ‘increase in pleasure,’ or ‘the having more than we had,’ would not extricate us from our difficulties. For then no stationary state could be happy at all, and no man would be happier than another, save in respect of being in more intense transition. The actual amount of pleasure would go for nothing. But it is not worth while to develope the absurdities consequent on such a possible definition.
