"Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasure; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs." And again, "It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect.... It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool or the pig is of a different opinion, it is because he only knows his own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides."
The net result of our discussion is, then, (1) that happiness consists in the fulfillment in their appropriate objects (or the anticipation of such fulfillment) of the powers of the self manifested in desires, purposes, efforts; (2) true happiness consists in the satisfaction of those powers of the self which are of higher quality; (3) that the man of good character, the one in whom these high powers are already active, is the judge, in the concrete, of happiness and misery. We shall now discuss
§ 3. THE CONSTITUTION OF HAPPINESS
Happiness consists in the agreement, whether anticipated or realized, of the objective conditions brought about by our endeavors with our desires and purposes. This conception of happiness is contrasted with the notion that it is a sum or collection of separate states of sensation or feeling.
1. One View Separates, while the Other Connects, Pleasure and Objective Conditions.—In one case, the agreeable feeling is a kind of psychical entity, supposed to be capable of existence by itself and capable of abstraction from the objective end of action. The pleasant thing is one thing; the pleasure, another; or, rather, the pleasant thing must be analyzed into two independent elements, the pleasure as feeling and the thing with which it happens to be associated. It is the pleasure alone, when dissociated, which is the real end of conduct, an object being at best an external means of securing it. It is the pleasurable feeling which happens to be associated with food, with music, with a landscape, that makes it good; health, art, are not good in themselves. The other view holds that pleasure has no such existence by itself; that it is only a name for the pleasant object; that by pleasure is meant the agreement or congruity which exists between some capacity of the agent and some objective fact in which this capacity is realized. It expresses the way some object meets, fits into, responds to, an activity of the agent. To say that food is agreeable, means that food satisfies an organic function. Music is pleasant because by it certain capacities or demands of the person with respect to rhythm of hearing are fulfilled; a landscape is beautiful because it carries to fulfillment the visual possibilities of the spectator.
2. Qualities of Pleasure Vary with Objects, and with Springs to Action.—When happiness is conceived as an aggregate of states of feeling, these are regarded as homogeneous in quality, differing from one another only in intensity and duration. Their qualitative differences are not intrinsic, but are due to the different objects with which they are associated (as pleasures of hearing, or vision). Hence they disappear when the pleasure is taken by itself as an end. But if agreeableness is precisely the agreeableness or congruousness of some objective condition with some impulse, habit, or tendency of the agent, then, of course, pure pleasure is a myth. Any pleasure is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions with its appropriate activity. The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the pleasure of drunkenness or of anger is still another. Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to pleasures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good as any other—the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindliness, simply as pleasure. Accordingly Bentham said, the pleasure of push-pin (a game) is as good as that of poetry. And as he said again, since pleasure is the motive of every act, there is no motive which in itself, and as far as it goes, is not good—it is bad only if it turns out in the end to produce more pain than pleasure. The pleasure of malignant gossip is so far as it is pleasure a mitigation of the badness of the act. Not so, if happiness is the experience into which pleasures enter so far as the tendencies of character that produce them are approved of. An act may bring a pleasure and yet that pleasure be no part of happiness, but rather a blot and blemish. Such would be the case, for example, with the pleasure which one might take in an act of charity because one had thereby put himself in a position superior to that of the recipient. A good man who caught himself feeling pleasure from this phase of the act would not regard this pleasure as a further element of good attained, but as detracting from his happiness. A pleasure may be accepted or reacted against. So far as not acquiesced in it is, from the standpoint of happiness, positively disagreeable. Surrender to a pleasure, taking it to be one's happiness, is one of the surest ways of revealing or discovering what sort of a man one is. On the other hand, the pain which a miserly man feels in his first acts of generosity may be welcomed by him as, under the circumstances, an element in his good, since it is a sign of and factor in the improvement of character.
3. The Unification of Character.—Happiness as a sum of pleasures does not afford a basis for unifying or organizing the various tendencies and capacities of the self. It makes possible at best only a mechanical compromise or external adjustment. Take, for example, the satisfaction attendant upon acting from a benevolent or a malicious impulse. There can be no question that some pleasure is found in giving way to either impulse when it is strongly felt. Now if we regard the pleasure as a fixed state in itself, and good or happiness as a sum of such states, the only moral superiority that can attach to acting benevolently is that, upon the whole, more units of pleasure come from it than from giving way to the opposite spring of action. It is simply a question of greater or less quantity in the long run. Each trait of character, each act, remains morally independent, cut off from others. Its only relation to others is that which arises when its results in the way of units of agreeable or painful feeling are compared, as to bulk, with analogous consequences flowing from some other trait, or act. But if the fundamental thing in happiness is the relation of the desire and intention of the agent to its own successful outlet, there is an inherent connection between our different tendencies. The satisfaction of one tendency strengthens itself, and strengthens allied tendencies, while it weakens others. A man who gives way easily to anger (and finds gratification in it) against the acts of those whom he regards as enemies, nourishes unawares a tendency to irritability in all directions and thus modifies the sources and nature of all satisfaction. The man who cherishes the satisfaction he derives from a landscape may increase his susceptibility to enjoyment from poetry and pictures.
The Final Question.—The final question of happiness, the question which marks off true and right happiness from false and wrong gratification, comes to this: Can there be found ends of action, desirable in themselves, which reënforce and expand not only the motives from which they directly spring, but also the other tendencies and attitudes which are sources of happiness? Can there be found powers whose exercise confirms ends which are stable and weakens and removes objects which occasion only restless, peevish, or transitory satisfaction, and ultimately thwart and stunt the growth of happiness? Harmony, reënforcement, expansion are the signs of a true or moral satisfaction. What is the good which while good in direct enjoyment also brings with it fuller and more continuous life?