[27.] All this is, in its essentials, universally known,[27] and is contested only by a few, and then not without great inconsistency. Far fewer have noticed an analogous distinction between the higher and lower forms of the feelings of pleasure and displeasure.
Our pleasure or displeasure is often quite like blind judgment, only an instinctive or habitual impulse. This is so in the case of the miser’s pleasure in piling up, in those powerful feelings of pleasure and pain connected in men and animals alike with the appearance of certain sensuous qualities, moreover, as is especially noticeable in tastes, different species and even different individuals, are affected in a quite contrary manner.
Many philosophers, and among them very considerable thinkers, have regarded only that mode of pleasure which is peculiar to the lower phenomena of the class, and have entirely overlooked the fact that there exists a pleasure and a displeasure of a higher kind. David Hume, for example, betrays almost in every word that he has absolutely no idea of the existence of this higher class.[28] How general this oversight has been may be judged from the fact that language has no common name for it.[29] Yet the fact is undeniable and we propose now to elucidate it by a few examples.
We have already said that we are endowed by nature with a pleasure for some tastes and an antipathy for others, both of which are purely instinctive. We also naturally take pleasure in clear insight, displeasure in error or ignorance. “All men,” says Aristotle in the beautiful introductory words of his Metaphysics,[30] “naturally desire knowledge.” This desire is an example which will serve our purpose. It is a pleasure of that higher form which is analogous to self-evidence in the sphere of judgment. In our species it is universal. Were there another species which, while having different preferences from us in respect of sensible qualities, were opposed to us in loving error for its own sake and hating insight, then assuredly we should not in the latter as in the former case say: that it was a matter of taste, “de gustibus non est disputandum”; rather we should here answer decisively that such love and hatred were fundamentally absurd, that such a species hated what was undeniably good, and loved what was undeniably bad in itself. Now why, where the feeling of compulsion is equally strong, do we answer differently in the one case than in the other? The answer is simple. In the former case the feeling of compulsion was an instinctive impulse; in the latter the natural feeling of pleasure is a higher love, having the character of rightness.[31] We therefore notice when we ourselves have such a feeling, that its object is not merely loved and lovable, its opposite hated and unlovable, but also that the one is worthy of love, the other worthy of hatred, and therefore that one is good, the other bad.
Another example. As we prefer insight to error, so also, generally speaking, we prefer joy (unless indeed it be joy in what is bad) to sadness. Were there beings among whom the reverse held good, we should regard such conduct as perverse, and rightly so. Here too it is because our love and our hatred are qualified as right.
A third example is found in feeling itself so far as it is right and has the character of rightness. As was the case with the rightness and evidence of the judgment, so also the rightness and higher character of the feelings are also reckoned as good, while love of the bad is itself bad.[32]
In order that, in the sphere of ideas, we may not leave the corresponding experiences unmentioned: here in the same way every idea is found to be something good in itself, and that with every enlargement in the realm of our ideas, quite apart from what of good or bad may result therefrom, the good within us is increased.[33]
Here then, and from such experiences of love qualified as right, arises within us the knowledge that anything is truly and unmistakably good in the full extent to which we are capable of such knowledge.[34]
This last clause is added advisedly; for we must not, of course, conceal from ourselves the fact that we have no guarantee that everything which is good will arouse within us a love with the character of rightness. Wherever this is not the case our criterion fails, and the good then, so far as our knowledge and practical account of it are concerned, is as much as non-existent.[35]
[28.] It is, however, not one but many things which we thus recognize as good. And so the questions remain: In that which is good, and especially in what, as good, is attainable, which is the better? and further, which is the highest practical good? so that it may become the standard for our actions.