His morality says, get what you never can get; never rest, never be satisfied, strive beyond the present to an impossible future.
The above is the proverbial experience of the voluptuary. His road to happiness is well known to be the worst, since pleasure there can not be, where there is no satisfaction; and he must end (whatever else may become of him) by giving up his earnest search for the sum of pleasures.
The third alternative is not to give up pleasure as an end, but to place happiness elsewhere than in the greatest possible amount of ‘grateful feeling.’ This is what the prudent man of the world, with a love for pleasure, generally does do. We take a certain quantity of pleasure, and absence of pain, as a fair amount, which we may call happiness, because we feel we can do with it: and to get this amount we take up some way of living, which we follow, in general without thinking of pleasure. If opportunity offers for delights by the way, we take them, but without inconveniencing ourselves, without leaving the road too far, and without thinking too much about it. It is a good rule to get more, but a rule we must not make too much of, or follow to the point of endangering our happiness, i.e. the fixed and fair amount which comes to us from our course of life.
Pleasure is still ostensibly the end; but really it has ceased to be so, and, whether we know it or not, our way of living is an end
