In the commencement of existence pleasure is secured mainly through the senses. Next come the higher social and domestic pleasures; then follow the intellectual enjoyments, the various gratifications of taste, and all the multitudinous resources open to a highly-cultivated, virtuous, and religious man.
The greater the number of these sources, and the more elevated the nature of each, the greater the degree of happiness gained.
Such, also, is the nature of things, that the lower kinds of happiness are placed first within our reach, and then, as the higher modes of enjoyment come, we often find them incompatible with the others, so that to obtain these we must, to some extent, relinquish the humbler classes. Thus, when a child begins to find the value of intellectual attainments, he sees they can not be gained without a sacrifice of many indulgences that are of an inferior value.
We now come to the grand law of the system in which we are placed, as it has been developed by the experience of our race, and that, in one word, is
SACRIFICE!
Each mind finds that it has conflicting desires, so that one class must constantly be sacrificed to another of superior value. And the rule in reference to individual enjoyment is "always to sacrifice the lesser for the greater good, having reference to the future as much as to the present."
This is the lesson of self-denial and self-control first taught to infancy and childhood, and just as fast as the reasoning powers are developed, the extent of this far-reaching rule is impressed on the mind. At first this rule is applied to the young child himself, and he is trained chiefly to understand what will injure or benefit himself.
But gradually a new and higher law begins to appear. As soon as the child can be made to understand that he is surrounded by other minds, who can suffer and enjoy by the same rules that regulate his happiness, he begins to learn the other and still higher law of sacrifice; and that is, that "the lesser good of the individual is always to be sacrificed to the greater good of the many, having reference always to the future as much as to the present."
Thus life commences with desires that are to be controlled and denied, first by parental power and influence, and next by the intellect and will of the child. And the farther life advances, the more numerous and complicated are the occasions where intellect must judge what is best for self, and what is best for the commonwealth, whose interests must have precedence.
And as self-denial always involves more or less pain, it becomes a fact that happiness is to be gained only by more or less suffering.