[76] It should be observed that neither Cumberland nor Shaftesbury uses the term “Good” (substantive) in a purely and exclusively hedonistic sense. But Shaftesbury uses it mainly in this sense: and Cumberland’s “Good” includes Happiness as well as Perfection.
[77] See Dissertation II. Of the Nature of Virtue appended to the Analogy. It may be interesting to notice a gradual change in Butler’s view on this important point. In the first of his Sermons on Human Nature, published some years before the Analogy, he does not notice, any more than Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, any possible want of harmony between Conscience and Benevolence. A note to Sermon XII., however, seems to indicate a stage of transition between the view of the first Sermon and the view of the Dissertation.
[78] Thus the end for which an individual is supposed to renounce the unlimited rights of the State of Nature is said (Leviathan, chap. xiv.) to be “nothing else but the security of a man’s person in this life, and the means of preserving life so as not to be weary of it.”
[79] Schiller’s Wallenstein.
[80] I shall afterwards try to explain how it comes about that, in modern thought, the proposition ‘My own Good is my only reasonable ultimate end’ is not a mere tautology, even though we define ‘Good’ as that at which it is ultimately reasonable to aim. Cf. post, chap. [ix.] and Book iii. chaps. [xiii.] [xiv.]
[81] Aristotle’s selection of εὐδαιμονία to denote what he elsewhere calls “Human” or “Practicable” good, and the fact that, after all, we have no better rendering for εὐδαιμονία than “Happiness” or “Felicity,” has caused no little misunderstanding of his system. Thus when Stewart (Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers, Book ii. chap. ii.) says that “by many of the best of the ancient moralists ... the whole of ethics was reduced to this question ... What is most conducive on the whole to our happiness?” the remark, if not exactly false, is certain to mislead his readers; since by Stewart, as by most English writers, “Happiness” is definitely conceived as consisting of “Pleasures” or “Enjoyments.”
[82] Thus Green (Prolegomena to Ethics, Book iii. chap. iv. § 228) says, “It is the realisation of those objects in which we are mainly interested, not the succession of enjoyments which we shall experience in realising them, that forms the definite content of our idea of true happiness, so far as it has such content at all.” Cf. also § 238. It is more remarkable to find J. S. Mill (Utilitarianism, chap. iv.) declaring that “money”—no less than “power” or “fame”—comes by association of ideas to be “a part of happiness,” an “ingredient in the individual’s conception of happiness.” But this seems to be a mere looseness of phraseology, venial in a treatise aiming at a popular style; since Mill has expressly said that “by happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain,” and he cannot mean that money is either the one or the other. In fact he uses in the same passage—as an alternative phrase for “parts of happiness”—the phrases “sources of happiness” and “sources of pleasure”: and his real meaning is more precisely expressed by these latter terms. That is, the distinction which he is really concerned to emphasise is that between the state of mind in which money is valued solely as a means of buying other things, and the state of mind—such as the miser’s—in which the mere consciousness of possessing it gives pleasure, apart from any idea of spending it.
[83] See Sermon XI. “... the cool principle of self-love or general desire of our own happiness.”
[84] Utilitarianism, chap. ii.
[85] I use the term “dictates” to include the view afterwards mentioned (§ [2]) in which the ultimately valid moral imperatives are conceived as relating to particular acts.