[125] Such discussion of the question as seemed desirable in a work like this will be found in the [concluding chapter] of the treatise.
[126] For a similar reason I shall here treat the notions of ‘Duty’ and ‘Virtuous action’ as practically coincident; reserving for future discussion the divergences between the two which reflection on the common usage of the terms appears to indicate. See Book iii. chap. [ii.]
[127] Whatever modifications of this division may afterwards appear to be necessary (cf. Book iii. chap. ii. § [1], and chap. vii. § [1]) will not, I think, tend to invalidate the conclusions of the present chapter.
[128] I do not here consider the case of revolutionists aiming sincerely at the general wellbeing; since the morality of such revolutions will generally be so dubious, that these cases cannot furnish any clear argument on either side of the question here discussed.
[129] Under the notion of ‘moral pain’ (or pleasure) I intend to include, in this argument, all pain (or pleasure) that is due to sympathy with the feelings of others. It is not convenient to enter, at this stage of the discussion, into a full discussion of the relation of Sympathy to Moral Sensibility; but I may say that it seems to me certain, on the one hand, that these two emotional susceptibilities are actually distinct in most minds, whatever they may have been originally; and on the other hand that sympathetic and strictly moral feelings are almost inextricably blended in the ordinary moral consciousness: so that, for the purposes of the present argument it is not of fundamental importance to draw a distinction between them. I have, however, thought it desirable to undertake a further examination of sympathy—as the internal sanction on which Utilitarians specially lay stress—in the [concluding chapter] of this treatise: to which, accordingly, the reader may refer.
[130] A striking confirmation of this is furnished by those Christian writers of the last century who treat the moral unbeliever as a fool who sacrifices his happiness both here and hereafter. These men were, for the most part, earnestly engaged in the practice of virtue, and yet this practice had not made them love virtue so much as to prefer it, even under ordinary circumstances, to the sensual and other enjoyments that it excludes. It seems then absurd to suppose that, in the case of persons who have not developed and strengthened by habit their virtuous impulses, the pain that might afterwards result from resisting the call of duty would always be sufficient to neutralise all other sources of pleasure.
[131] “It should seem that a due concern about our own interest or happiness, and a reasonable endeavour to secure and promote it, ... is virtue, and the contrary behaviour faulty and blamable.” Butler (in the Dissertation Of the Nature of Virtue appended to the Analogy).
[132] This view is suggested by Mr. Herbert Spencer’s statement—in a letter to J. S. Mill, published in Mr. Bain’s Mental and Moral Science; and partially reprinted in Mr. Spencer’s Data of Ethics, chap. iv. § 21—that “it is the business of moral science to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of existence, what kinds of actions necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness,” and that when it has done this, “its deductions are to be recognised as laws of conduct; and are to be conformed to irrespective of a direct estimate of happiness or misery.” I ought, however, to say that Mr. Spencer has made it clear in his latest treatise that the only cogent deductions of this kind which he conceives to be possible relate to the behaviour not of men here and now, but of ideal men living in an ideal society, and living under conditions so unlike those of actual humanity that all their actions produce “pleasure unalloyed with pain anywhere” (Data of Ethics, § 101). The laws of conduct in this Utopia constitute, in Mr. Spencer’s view, the subject-matter of “Absolute Ethics”; which he distinguishes from the “Relative Ethics” that concerns itself with the conduct of the imperfect men who live under the present imperfect social conditions, and of which the method is, as he admits, to a great extent “necessarily empirical” (Data of Ethics, § 108). How far such a system as Mr. Spencer calls Absolute Ethics can be rationally constructed, and how far its construction would be practically useful, I shall consider in a later part of this treatise (Book iv. chap. [iv.]), when I come to deal with the method of Universalistic Hedonism: at present I am only concerned with the question how far any deductive Ethics is capable of furnishing practical guidance to an individual seeking his own greatest happiness here and now.
[133] Aristotle’s theory is, briefly, that every normal sense-perception or rational activity has its correspondent pleasure, and that the most perfect is the most pleasant: the most perfect in the case of any faculty being the exercise of the faculty in good condition on the best object. The pleasure follows the activity immediately, giving it a kind of finish, “like the bloom of youth.” Pleasures vary in kind, as the activities that constitute life vary: the best pleasures are those of the philosophic life.
[134] See Bouillier, Du plaisir et de la douleur, chap. iii.; L. Dumont, Théorie scientifique de la sensibilité, chap. iii.; as well as Stout, Analytic Psychology, chap. xii.—to which I refer later.