Through the mouth of Hamlet Shakespeare makes the philosophical reflection—“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so;” in other words, the value of anything reckoned in the currency of enjoyment, lies not in the thing itself but in the strength of our wish for it. Most of the aims of effort are like curios, whose price is gauged entirely by the anxiety of the amateur to obtain them, and not by any intrinsic quality.
In life there is no more useful faculty than to be able to put the right price on pleasures. The best of prudential maxims is “Count the cost.” The outlay of effort should
be in a just relation to the return which can be reasonably reckoned upon. A given pleasure should be sought with an energy strictly in proportion to the gratification which it can actually yield,—not in proportion to a false ideal of that gratification as portrayed by the exaggerations of passion or morbid desire. When infatuation or fascination or an over-heated imagination leads the chase, horse and rider will be soon landed in the ditch. Pain and disappointment ever follow an end sought in excess of its real value. Again to quote the great dramatist, the “expense of passion” is sure to be succeeded by “a waste of shame.”
The precept of education which is thus enforced is the regulation of desire by reflection and deliberation. Proceed to an appraisement, as in business affairs. Ask yourself the grounds of your desire. Is it from experience, or merely on hearsay, and from a groundless imagining of what the object might yield if attained? If it is from experience, and the tasted sweet whets anew the appetite, recall the reaction and the consequences, and if they were unpleasant, present them fully before the bar of your judgment. If imagination alone influences you, remember that you are playing the children’s game of “swapping in the dark,” and are liable to exchange solid value for dross. “Depraved affections,” observes Lord Bacon, “are false valuations.”
V. The last of the five principles stated is the crown of all of them,—Make all pleasures a part of happiness.
I have already explained the difference between mere pleasurable sensation and happiness in the true sense of the term. While the former belongs to man’s animal nature, the latter is intimately associated with the consciousness of Self. The power of discriminating one’s Self from the rest of the universe, and making one’s Self the subject of one’s own observation is a faculty peculiar to man alone. There is nothing which lends him more potent aid to accomplish this than his pleasurable sensations. This alone imparts to them any real value in the history of the individual or the race, and through this their value becomes inestimable.
This has always been recognized as true of some of them; but the error of most teachers has been that they have refused to acknowledge the value of all pleasure to this end, the excellence of all enjoyment, when it is brought into relation to the full nature of man. Some have claimed that the charms derived from the esthetic and benevolent emotions are enough to fill our lives; others advocate intellectual joys; many preach that the religious sentiment offers all that man needs; while counselors of an opposite tendency cry, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow ye die.”
All are wrong. The spirit of sound culture will recognize the whole nature of man and the solidarity of all his parts, and will insist on respecting that unity, if his true development is to be accomplished. For this reason it will strive to render the pleasures of the senses and emotions as intellectual as possible; and with not less earnestness
will aim to keep the pleasures of the intellect in touch with the emotions and the senses. Its principle will be that the more intimately the gratifications of sense are infused with emotion and thought, the more they will be both purified and strengthened; and the closer the web into which we can weave the austere joys of the reason along with the emotions and the feelings, the more sympathetic, wide-reaching, and ennobling will those joys become. As the ancient mason mingled water from the sky with clay from the earth to make the bricks wherewith to build the temple, so the permanent structure of human progress can be erected only by combining in due proportion the extremes of man’s delights.
A real though mysterious bond unites sense with that which is above and beyond sense. Toward this Unknown it is ever striving, though blindly and unconsciously. In lower forms of life this has led to that marvelous series of transformations which, at last, have reached their culmination in man. In him the struggle no longer expends itself in physical changes, but frames the ideals which float before his mind, constantly spurring him to attempt the impossible. Rest assured that the analogy which holds good throughout all organic nature fails not in him, its most perfect production. Somehow, by unknown ways and under the guidance of unseen laws, his unwearying effort to discover the invisible in the visible, the permanent in the transient, the ideal in the real, will infallibly lead him in triumph to the final goal of all Life. Whenever,