pleasure’; and whether that pleasure is to be got in morality, or merely by morality, yet the getting of the pleasure is the ultimate aim. Pleasure for pleasure’s sake is the end, and nothing else is an end in any sense, except so far as it is a means to pleasure. This, we repeat once more, is absolutely irreconcileable with ordinary moral beliefs. And not only is Hedonism repudiated by those beliefs as immoral; but as we saw, so far as the popular mind has pronounced upon it, it is also declared to be impracticable. These two points we wished to make clear, and with this result we have finished the first or introductory part of our undertaking.
It remains to ask in the second place, Why is it that pleasure-seeking, as the search for my pleasure, is declared vain, and pleasure itself impalpable and misleading, a something which gives us no standard to work by, and no end to aim at, no system to realize in our lives? We must look for an answer to the nature of pleasure.
Pleasure and pain are feelings, and they are nothing but feelings. It would perhaps be right to call them the two simple modes of self-feeling; but we are not here concerned with psychological accuracy. The point which we wish to emphasize, and which we think is not doubtful, is that, considered psychically, they are nothing whatever but states of the feeling self. This means that they exist in me only as long as I feel them, and only as I feel them, that beyond this they have no reference to anything else, no validity and no meaning whatever. They are ‘subjective’ because they neither have, nor pretend to, reality beyond this or that subject. They are as they are felt to be, but they tell us nothing. In one word, they have no content: they are as states of us, but they have nothing for us.
I do not think it is necessary to dwell on this matter. Let us proceed to the application. The practical end, if it is to be a practical goal and standard, must present itself to us as some definite unity, some concrete whole that we can realize in our acts, and carry out in our life. And pleasure (as pain) we find to be nothing but a name which stands for a series of this, that, and the other feelings, which are not except in the moment or moments that they are felt, which have as a series neither limitation of number, beginning nor end, nor in themselves any refer-
