decrease of pleasure proportionate to heightening of quality of function. But, when the two come thus before the mind separately, we feel we must choose function and not pleasure.
In conclusion, there is one way in which pleasure may be used as a test of function. It shows whether function is impeded in discharge or not. But by it you can not tell higher from lower function; and, if you go by it, you must prefer a lower state of harmony to a higher state of self-contradiction.
For the sake of clearness I have run the risk of wearisome length and repetition. In the foregoing Essay I have sharply, not I hope too sharply, criticized Hedonism. From a somewhat more positive consideration I have reached the same result. And now in a spirit of conciliation I would ask the Utilitarian, whose heart is in the right place, who does not care about pleasure, but who wants something definite, to consider this,—whether to take life as the end, the highest and ever a higher life, be more vague than Hedonism; whether it does not give him all he wants; and whether, beside being more in harmony with morality, it is not equally antagonistic to Asceticism.
If our end is to realize the life or the self which is realized in all life, and to develope this in more distinctively human forms, and if we consider that this life to be realized must be realized in living individuals, we shall be far enough from asceticism. There is here no abstract negation of human nature, no sacrifice of detail and fulness to a barren formula. The universal is realized only in the free self-developement of the individual, and the individual can only truly develope his individuality by specifying in himself the common life of all. As we repudiate the liberty of Individualism (better, Particularism), so we repudiate the tyranny of the (abstract) universal. The member is no member but a parasitical excrescence, if it does not live with the life of the whole; the whole life does not exist except in the life of the members. And here, in the moral sphere, the members are self-conscious. It is then only in the intensity of the self-consciousness of the members that the whole can be intensely realized. Furthermore, these members are spiritualized animals; everything human stands on the basis of animal life; and to make self-realization the end not only justifies but demands attention to the well-being and happiness of man as a spiritualized animal, because the feeling of inner harmony is required for, is the psychical condition of, maintenance and progress of function. So far as this we go and must go, but no further; we ought not to sacrifice what seems to be maintenance or progress of function to prospect of increased
