occurs to us to identify the two, and say selfishness is this pursuit. Can we do this? Or shall we find that, though the pursuit certainly is selfishness, yet selfishness is more than it, is a wider term than mere pleasure-seeking? That we shall see better, when we know more accurately what pleasure-seeking is, a question which as yet we have not asked.
Confusion here is inevitable unless we are cautious. We talk of pleasure and pleasures as if they were something by themselves, and apart from the pleasant; as if a pleasant activity were simply a pleasure, and as if a pleasant feeling had no other content than its pleasantness. This is clearly unjustifiable. Pleasure we have called the feeling of self-assertion, but we must remember that there is no such thing as the mere abstract assertion of the self. The self is affirmed in this or that, and the this or that of the particular affirmation must be felt: the self-feeling is not one thing by itself, which is divisible from what is felt in the self: the feeling, and the feeling myself affirmed or denied, are not parts but elements or aspects of one whole, to be distinguished and not divided. It may indeed possibly be maintained that the general feeling of pleasure, which goes with the pleasant, can be distinguished in such a way as to be brought before the imagination by itself, and apart from this or that particular pleasant feeling, and it does not concern us here to contest such a proposition; but what is quite clear, and what we insist upon, is that the representation of this feeling of pleasure as such would not be what is ordinarily called the idea of a pleasure. If the abstraction can be made and brought before the mind, yet people do not commonly do this. A pleasure for them means something pleasant: in a pleasant feeling they do not separate the pleasure from what in particular is felt; they follow ἡδέα and not ηδονή. This or that pleasant is not aimed at simply as a pleasure; and the pursuit of pleasure in general for pleasure’s sake would mean the abstraction from the pleasant of its pleasantness, and the setting that as an object before the mind. Such an end, the notion of the self simply to be pleased, is an intellectual abstraction, and the consistent pursuit of it exists only in theory. The ideal voluptuary desires only pleasure, and the pleasant merely as a means thereto; but this ideal is not to be found, and his supposed consistent hunt is a practical impossibility.
