Good fare, good manners, good company,—these are the three graces which should preside over the dinner table. Then will the meal include, in the words of Sydney Smith, “Everything of sensual and intellectual gratification which a great nation can glory in producing.”
Table-talk,—the best of talk. Even Kant thought it not beneath him to give rules for it: first, of the weather and the roads; next, the current events of the day; then history, art, and philosophy. So did Marsilius Ficinus: first, of divine things; then anecdotes; finally, of art and music.
The unthinking are prone to confine the meaning of Pleasure to Sensation. The coarsest philosophy of life is the most popular, because it is most easily understood, and because it appeals to the universal, which are the merely animal, traits of human nature.
IV. The Pleasures we may Derive from our Emotions.
The emotions are sensations translated into Memory and commented on by the Imagination, with the usual distortion and falsification of the original, characteristic of all translators and commentators.
The primary emotions of Hope and Fear are the recollections of pleasure or pain projected into the future; the disappointment of hope or the realization of fear brings sorrow, regret, or remorse, feelings which are concerned with the past alone.