There is no such thing as a Eudæmometer measuring with accuracy the degrees of happiness realised by men in different ages, under different circumstances, and with different characters. Perhaps if such a thing existed it might tend to discourage us by showing that diversities and improvements of circumstances affect real happiness in a smaller degree than we are accustomed to imagine. Our nature accommodates itself speedily to improved circumstances, and they cease to give positive pleasure while their loss is acutely painful. Advanced civilisation brings with it countless and inestimable benefits, but it also brings with it many forms of suffering from which a ruder existence is exempt. There is some reason to believe that it is usually accompanied with a lower range of animal spirits, and it is certainly accompanied with an increased sensitiveness to pain. Some philosophers have contended that this is the best of all possible worlds. It is difficult to believe so, as the whole object of human effort is to make it a better one. But the success of that effort is more apparent in the many terrible forms of human suffering which it has abolished or diminished than in the higher level of positive happiness that has been attained.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Latter-day Pamphlets: 'Jesuitism.'
[7] Le Marchant's Life of Althorp, p. 143.
CHAPTER IV
Though the close relationship that subsists between morals and happiness is universally acknowledged, I do not belong to the school which believes that pleasure and pain, either actual or anticipated, are the only motives by which the human will can be governed; that virtue resolves itself ultimately into well-considered interest and finds its ultimate reason in the happiness of those who practise it; that 'all our virtues,' as La Rochefoucauld has said, 'end in self-love as the rivers in the sea.' Such a proverb as 'Honesty is the best policy' represents no doubt a great truth, though it has been well said that no man is really honest who is only honest through this motive, and though it is very evident that it is by no means an universal truth but depends largely upon changing and precarious conditions of laws, police, public opinion, and individual circumstances. But in the higher realms of morals the coincidence of happiness and virtue is far more doubtful. It is certainly not true that the highest nature is necessarily or even naturally the happiest. Paganism has produced no more perfect type than the profoundly pathetic figure of Marcus Aurelius, while Christianity finds its ideal in one who was known as the 'Man of Sorrows.' The conscience of Mankind has ever recognised self-sacrifice as the supreme element of virtue, and self-sacrifice is never real when it is only the exchange of a less happiness for a greater one. No moral chemistry can transmute the worship of Sorrow, which Goethe described as the essence of Christianity, into the worship of happiness, and probably with most men health and temperament play a far larger part in the real happiness of their lives than any of the higher virtues. The satisfaction of accomplished duty which some moralists place among the chief pleasures of life is a real thing in so far as it saves men from internal reproaches, but it is probable that it is among the worst men that pangs of conscience are least dreaded, and it is certainly not among the best men that they are least felt. Conscience, indeed, when it is very sensitive and very lofty, is far more an element of suffering than the reverse. It aims at an ideal higher than we can attain. It takes the lowest view of our own achievements. It suffers keenly from the many shortcomings of which it is acutely sensible. Far from indulging in the pleasurable retrospect of a well-spent life, it urges men to constant, painful, and often unsuccessful effort. A nature that is strung to the saintly or the heroic level will find itself placed in a jarring world, will provoke much friction and opposition, and will be pained by many things in which a lower nature would placidly acquiesce. The highest form of intellectual virtue is that love of truth for its own sake which breaks up prejudices, tempers enthusiasm by the full admission of opposing arguments and qualifying circumstances, and places in the sphere of possibility or probability many things which we would gladly accept as certainties. Candour and impartiality are in a large degree virtues of temperament; but no one who has any real knowledge of human nature can doubt how much more pleasurable it is to most men to live under the empire of invincible prejudice, deliberately shutting out every consideration that could shake or qualify cherished beliefs. 'God,' says Emerson, 'offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please. You can never have both.' One of the strongest arguments of natural religion rests upon the fact that virtue so often fails to bring its reward; upon the belief that is so deeply implanted in human nature that this is essentially unjust and must in some future state be remedied.
For such reasons as these I believe it to be impossible to identify virtue with happiness, and the views of the opposite school seem to me chiefly to rest upon an unnatural and deceptive use of words. Even when the connection between virtue and pleasure is most close, it is true, as the old Stoics said, that though virtue gives pleasure, this is not the reason why a good man will practise it; that pleasure is the companion and not the guide of his life; that he does not love virtue because it gives pleasure, but it gives pleasure because he loves it.[8] A true account of human nature will recognise that it has the power of aiming at something which is different from happiness and something which may be intelligibly described as higher, and that on the predominance of this loftier aim the nobility of life essentially depends. It is not even true that the end of man should be to find peace at the last. It should be to do his duty and tell the truth.