pleasure. But I do not think that the Utilitarian wishes to teach that doctrine; and whatever he wants to teach he can teach without making pleasure the end. To repeat it once more, if self-realization is the end, then pleasure is a relative end and good, because a condition without which good is impossible; and hence to increase pleasure is good, though we need not add ‘for pleasure’s sake.’ And unhappiness is evil, if it is a psychical state which tends to exclude the good, and may be treated as an evil, which it is our bounden duty to fight against, without our being forced to say ‘it is the evil itself, and there is no evil beyond it.’
If again it is objected that the end is vague and has no content, the following Essays will to a certain extent, I hope, remove the objection. Here we may reply that to take human progress as the end, and to keep our eye on past progress, is not an useless prescription; and if any one wants a moral philosophy to tell him what in particular he is to do, he will find that there neither is nor can be such a thing, and at all events will not find it in Hedonism.
One word on the unconscious or latent Hedonism of society in its progress. That is no argument for making pleasure the end, as the reader who has followed me so far will, I trust, at once see. Taking for granted the asserted fact, that society tends to identify what brings pleasure with what is good, we altogether deny the Hedonistic inference. If society tends to realize life more highly and perfectly, it is obvious that it must also realize the conditions of such life. The fact that life can not exist without pleasure does not prove pleasure to be the end of life, unless we are prepared to say (the illustration is not a good one) that because as a man rises in society he wears better clothes, therefore to be dressed like a gentleman was the conscious or unconscious end of his advancement. Of course it might have been, but do we say that it was? Or, again, a mother may have desired her daughter’s health not for her health’s sake, but for the sake of her looks; but would it not be an unfounded inference to conclude that it must have been so? The argument we have noticed holds against asceticism, but we must entreat the reader to bear in mind that the opposite of a false view may be every whit as false; and that you could argue from the denial of asceticism to the assertion of Hedonism only if you had previously made good your alternative, your ‘either—or’ of the two.
Finally (as we have already gone beyond all bounds), let us make a remark on the phrase ‘Utilitarianism.’ It is a thoroughly bad name, and misleads a great many persons. It does indeed express the fact that, for Hedonism, virtue and action are not the end, but are useful as mere means to something outside them.
