The Hedonist may reply to the arguments which I have been presenting that he does not mean that happiness is the only motive of human action, but that it is the ultimate motive; we admit, he may say, that every feeling which moves man to action has its peculiar and specific object, and that thus man is influenced by many motives; but we affirm that in all these the ultimate motive is the enjoyment which is to result. The point which I now make is that the Hedonistic maxim as thus explained is still in direct contradiction to obvious and fundamental facts in the constitution and action of man. For the happiness does not exist as an antecedent objective reality, but is itself the result of the man's own desire or choice of the object. Happiness is the smile that beams on the gratification of desire. As a man is not happy in order to smile, but smiles because he is happy already, so a man does not desire and choose an object in order to be happy; but he is happy in the object because he desires and chooses it. Happiness is not bottled up in outward things, so much happiness in a house and grounds, so much in horses and equipage, and whoever gets the object gets the same definite amount of enjoyment. But whether a person finds any enjoyment whatever in an object depends on the state of his own heart towards it. Hence every new affection opens a new source of enjoyment. Here is a young man whose present enjoyment consists in spending his earnings in clothing, horses and the like. By and by the love of wife and children is in his heart, and that new love has opened to him new motives of action, new objects of interest, new sources of enjoyment, a new world in which to expatiate. He is born again into a new life. Or he travels and becomes interested in art; he studies botany and becomes interested in plants, or geology and becomes interested in the structure of the earth; or he identifies himself with some moral reform or some political party; and each new motive opens a new world of joy, a spring of living water flowing out of the man and clothing with verdure and fertility what to him had been a desert. And in many cases of this kind, what, after the new love has sprung up, is a source of joy, had been before disgusting; a boy who hates to study may become afterwards a lover of learning; a debauchee, to whom a sober and religious life is repulsive, may come to love God, to rejoice in sobriety, purity, beneficence and devotion, while his former debauchery in its turn becomes disgusting. As Paul describes his own. experience in his conversion, what he had regarded as loss became gain, and what he had regarded as gain became loss. Evidently in these cases it is not the enjoyment which kindles the desire or affection or choice, but the desire, affection or choice which kindles the enjoyment. Happiness, therefore, cannot be the ultimate motive of all action. * III. The Hedonistic maxim that all pleasures are of the same kind and equal worth, and are distinguishable only by their degree of intensity, continuity and duration, is contrary to the facts of human nature and action. 1. Since happiness does not exist in objective reality, but is wholly relative to and dependent on the subjective state of the person, enjoyments must be discriminated from each other and cannot be grouped together as of the same kind. They must be distinguished by their subjective sources. The enjoyments arising from gluttony, drunkenness and licentiousness are not the same in kind with those arising from intellectual discovery, virtuous character and the achievements of Christian beneficence. The joys of sin are not like the joys of holiness. The joy of communing with a harlot is not the same with the joy of communing with God. The joy of miserliness is not the same with the joy of beneficence. It would be impossible to convince a converted debauchee that the pleasures of his debauchery, the remembrance of which fills him with shuddering and disgust, were the same in kind with the pleasures of his present sobriety, industry and piety. Pleasures are also discriminated by their tendency. They are motives. The drunkard's enjoyments are a stimulus to new excesses. The sinner's pleasure in sin impels him on in sinning. By his own preference and choice he gravitates downward; he finds his happiness in sin; he regards it as his good; he thinks it impossible to enjoy a life of virtue Pres. Edwards says: "Some say that all love arises from self-love; and that it is impossible in the nature of things for any man to have any love to God or any other being but that love to himself must be the foundation of it. But I humbly suppose that it is for want of consideration that they say so. They argue that whoever loves God and so desires his glory or the enjoyment of him, desires these things as his own happiness. The glory of God and the beholding and enjoying his perfections are considered as things agreeable to him, tending to make him happy. And so they say it is through self-love or a desire of his own happiness that he desires God should be glorified and desires to behold and enjoy his glorious perfections. There is no doubt that after God's glory and beholding his perfections are become so agreeable to him, he will desire them as his own happiness. But how came these things to be so agreeable to him that he esteems it his highest happiness to glorify God? Is not this the fruit of love? Must not a man first love God and have his heart united to him, before he will esteem God's good his own, and before he will desire the glorifying of God as his own happiness? It is not strong arguing that, because after a man has his heart united to God in love and, as a fruit of this, desires God's glory as his own happiness, therefore a desire of his own happiness must needs be the cause and foundation of his love; unless it be strong reasoning that because a father begat a son, therefore his son certainly begat him." and godliness. He "cannot see the kingdom of heaven." With his eager joy in sin he stoops downward as he runs and his "steps take hold on hell." But the Christian's joy is an impulse to Christian service, an inspiration for good, a strengthening of faith and love; it gives wings to bear him nearer to God. 2. Enjoyments are not essentially good, but may be evil. That a person is happy is no proof of his well-being. Because they are inseparable from the subjective state of the person, enjoyments cannot of themselves alone constitute the good or well-being of a man. The character of the person which makes the enjoyment possible must be an element in the good. As Tennyson says, "Better thirty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." When a man enjoys to-day what disgusts him to-morrow, when one enjoys what disgusts another, these joys cannot be alike and indiscriminately the good or well-being of man. Pleasure therefore may be evil and not good. The pleasure which breathes from an evil character and which would give place to sorrow if the character were good, cannot be good, but must itself be evil. The pleasure which impels the sinner to more wickedness, which precludes the capacity of joy in right living, which the sinner chooses as his good and so brings on himself the woe pronounced on those who call evil good and good evil, this pleasure is not good, but evil. The sinner finding his enjoyment in this may fitly exclaim with Milton's Satan, "All good to me is lost; evil be thou my good." The worst evil of sin is the joy which the sinner feels in it. 3. Enjoyments must also be distinguished as to their essential worth. Man is a rational being. In the normal development of his constitution he has the fundamental ideas of reason, Truth, Law and Perfection. Any theory of human life which ignores this great fact must be fundamentally wrong. It is only by rigidly excluding all cognizance of this fact that it is possible to regard all pleasure as of the same quality, dignity and worth. 4. Accordingly the common sense of mankind rejects the doctrine. It is impossible to attach the same quality, dignity and worth to the pleasure of a pig with one foot in the trough, and the joy of Archimedes shouting Eureka, at a discovery of the method of ascertaining specific gravity; to the maudlin happiness of a drunken man and the solemn ecstasy of Kepler, when he exclaimed, "Oh, God, I read thy thoughts after thee;" to the joy of a pinched and skinny miser and the enthusiasm of a Raphael putting the creations of his genius on the canvas; to the devilish glee of Nero in his atrocities and the joy of Paul suffering the loss of all things in his labor to save his fellow-men and his rapture in his dungeon triumphant in the face of a bloody death. The Hedonistic doctrine that all these joys are of the same quality and distinguishable only in quantity is contrary to reason and common sense. It does violence also to the deepest and best sentiments of the human heart, which rise in indignation against it. As John Locke said that the love of virtue is the same in kind with the love of grapes, this theory degrades the loftiest of human joys to the level of swinish enjoyment; it pours them all into the same barrel to be measured out by the pailful like swill. If this theory were true, then, as Plato twice intimates, it would be wise for a man to catch the itch for the pleasure of scratching.* And the pleasure of Sidney Smith's cattle, rubbing their backs under the sloping pole which he had contrived to accommodate them all from the smallest calf to the tallest ox, would be the same in kind with the amused and kindly gratification of their owner in seeing the happy effects of his contrivance. In fact it is according to the common consent of mankind that pains and sorrows may be of more dignity and worth than joys. Witness the universal admiration of Rebekah in Scott's Ivanhoe as she stood on the summit of the tower ready to fling herself down; of Leonidas and his Spartans giving their lives for their country; of John Howard visiting the prisons of all Europe and finally sacrificing his life to reform their discipline. Even J. S. Mill, though himself a Utilitarian, is obliged to confess, "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than to be a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." This is the admission that other elements than happiness enter into the idea of the good. Mr. Mulford truly and forcibly says, "There has been no nation but in the beginnings of its history there was a consciousness of a relation to a world which it did not conquer with its swords and whose fruits it did not gather in its barns nor exchange in its markets. There has been none which, in the greater periods of its history, did not recognize ends whose worth had no estimate in material values, and in the crises of its history did not call for an effort for which its economists could find no rate of compensation in the wages of labor."‡ IV. Hedonism gives no available test for discriminating the superior from the inferior good, even according to its own principle that enjoyments are to be compared only by quantity or degree of intensity, continuity and duration. It is impossible to determine by observation what will give the most *Gorgias, 494. Philebus, 46. † Utilitarianism, p. 42. happiness during the whole of existence. We cannot see into the future; and so complicated and far-reaching are the influences and results of our actions that no one can determine empirically what the aggregate effect on his happiness will be. Another reason is the fact that happiness depends on a person's desires and preferences; what a person enjoys with his present character, tastes and preferences, he may presently, through a change in himself, become incapable of enjoying; hence he may prefer what is really evil to what is really good, and may find all the enjoyment of which he is now capable in the evil and be incapable of enjoying the good. This theory gives no test for distinguishing the superior from the inferior good, or for determining what course of action will insure the highest good. Thus it fails in distinguishing enjoyments as to their quantity as really as it fails to distinguish them as to quality, dignity and worth. In either case the only criterion is in the principles, laws and ideals of reason. Whatever accords with these is at once the true and the highest good. This is a test always present and available. V. Hedonism is incompatible with any fundamental and essential distinction of right and wrong. It attempts to derive the idea of right from that of happiness. But the idea of right cannot be developed from the idea of happiness. Hedonism, starting with the idea of the good as consisting in indiscriminate enjoyment, can never lift itself out of that idea to the idea of right and law. It must stick inextricably in the idea of the pleasurable and the expedient. This, however, is not the place to consider the ethical bearing of this theory. 49. The Good Estimated by the Standard of Reason. I. The rational standard or criterion by which the good is ascertained and distinguished from evil is the truths, laws and ideals of reason. I cannot begin with the fact of enjoyment and say, "I enjoy this, therefore it is good." I must bring the objects, achievements and acquisitions which are the sources of joy into the light of reason and in that light approve or disapprove them and the happiness which they occasion. Thus the answer to the question, "What is the Good?" is analogous to the answers to the questions, "What is the True, the Right, the Perfect?" It has been shown in respect to each of the three that the attempt to develop them from the feelings fails to give any real distinction between the true and the absurd, the right and the wrong, the perfect and the imperfect, and even to attain the ideas of truth, law and perfection. The same is true of the distinction of good and evil. It cannot be |