valuable preliminaries to the pursuit of happiness, but are not always essential to it, and in many instances an over-solicitude about them destroys all chance for a higher felicity. Happiness does not come of itself. It has to be worked for, fought for; and courage and endurance are as necessary in this as in any other struggle. In the path of every pilgrim to the Celestial City stand from time to time the giant figures of Death and Pain, and shake their spears, saying, “Wilt thou dare?”
The sources of pleasure should, therefore, be multiplied to the utmost, and they should be classified, so that undue value should not be assigned any one class. Theoretically, there is nothing troublesome about this; practically, it is often an insurmountable difficulty. The pleasures of the senses are inferior to those of the emotions, and these in turn are ranked by the enjoyments which pertain to the exercise of the intellectual powers. No one of these can wholly exclude the others. They are all inseparably united in the individual entity; but the individual can enjoy only with the faculties he possesses, and in proportion to their relative strength. It is as absurd to ask more of him, as it were to invite the gouty to a foot race, or the blind to admire the colors in a painting.
It is well to establish and to recognize this hierarchy of enjoyments, beginning with those of the sensations common to animal life everywhere and culminating in those of pure reason, whose crowning felicity is the pursuit of truth; it has been done, and well done, by many writers; but what has been generally overlooked is that this scheme can have small practical application to the conduct of life if it is not fully recognized that no one of these roads to happiness can be successfully pursued while the others are neglected, or branded with the sign, “Entrance forbidden.”
This is where Asceticism has committed its fatal blunder, and for thousands of years has made miserable the lives of millions. Instead of self-control, it has demanded self-abnegation; instead of the due and proportioned exercise of all the powers, it has ordered the absolute disuse of some of them; quite as often of the highest as of the lowest, of reason as often as lust. Under this baleful doctrine nations have become misshapen in mind, atrophied in culture, distorted from honest nature’s rule, mean, miserable, and inefficient. Yet this same doctrine is preached to-day from thousands of pulpits in lands of highest civilization. Is it not time for the common sense of most to rise in protest against such a survival from the Dark Ages of the life of the race? Reason blushes only for pleasures which she cannot explain, and he who acquaints himself with the whole nature of man knows that all his powers and faculties have their appropriate use. The ascetic may claim a happiness all his own; but so do the extravagant and the vicious; both stand condemned before the results of their own successes.
The intellect has no right to chide the enjoyments of the senses. Pleasures differ in degree and permanence, but not in kind. As pleasures they are on a par, whether derived from objects of sense, from the emotions, or from the understanding. Such analysts of mind as Kant and Epictetus agree that there is no essential distinction between the most refined and the coarsest gratifications. “It is one and the same vital force expressing itself in the Desires, which is affected by all objects which cause Pleasure.”
IV. The Distribution of Happiness.
Having reached an understanding about what happiness means, and some notion as to its various grades, it will next be worth while to study its distribution in the several classes of society, in contrasting grades of civilization, in the two sexes, and at various ages. This will be dealing with the subject according to the methods of natural science, and it ought to lead to some interesting conclusions.
One might expect to find a general agreement as to the main facts. Far from it. The common belief is that happiness increases with the means, or at least with the capacity, for happiness. It is this belief which inspires men to labor for the means and improve their capacities. But the philosophers nowise concede its correctness. Hume argued that all who are happy are equally happy; and Paley maintained that happiness is about equally distributed among all orders of the community; that the plowman gets as much real enjoyment out of life as the philosopher, and the beggar at the gate as much as the monarch on the throne. To which Dr. Johnson replied that a small glass and a large one might be equally full, but the latter holds more. The capacity, he justly argued, of the philosopher to receive a multiplicity of agreeable impressions is greater than that of the peasant, and therefore, other things being equal, the quantity of his enjoyment will be greater.
The learned Doctor, indeed, sometimes insisted that felicity increases directly with the means of enjoyment. Representing the latter by money, he would say that a man with six thousand pounds a year should be ten times as happy as the one with six hundred a year; and if he is not, it is because he is an ass.
Here he was certainly wrong. Some of the main elements of ordinary happiness are in the possession of every class of society, high and low, poor and rich; such as the means of self-preservation, family ties, friendship, amusement, and repose. What wealth and power add to this common stock becomes less and less at each remove. This consideration led Bentham to question whether the prince is twice as happy as the laborer, and to doubt whether ten thousand times the wealth brings with it twice the enjoyment. His followers have attempted to frame the relation in a mathematical formula, and have expressed it in the maxim, “The rate of increase of pleasure decreases as its means increase.”
The conclusion is a satisfactory one for several reasons, and appears to be borne out by the experience of mankind. Gibbon quotes the saying of the potent Sultan Abderrahman, who at the close of his brilliant reign of forty years asserted that during the whole of that time he had had but fourteen days of happiness; on which the historian comments that he himself could claim many more than the famous Prince.
The moral of the story is, that it is not the multiplication of the means, but of the sources of pleasure which is the secret of happiness.
The extremes of the social conditions are almost equally unfavorable, the one through the privations it entails, the other through the burdens it imposes and the distractions it brings. Both are unpropitious to self-culture, and this alone lays substantial foundations for a considerable enjoyment of life.
A similar debate has taken place in reference to the distribution of happiness in the different grades of civilization. Rousseau and his followers never tired of portraying the delights of the savage state. Like the ancient Greeks, he placed the Golden Age in some Arcadia of untutored shepherds and lawless huntsmen. It is the fashion to smile at his notion as the vagary of a crank; but the scientist of our own day whose studies of the conditions of savage tribes stand ahead of all others, has deliberately expressed almost the same opinion as the result of his long researches. “Civilization,” writes Dr. Theodore Waitz, “has proved itself impotent to increase the sum of human enjoyment.”
What a sad conclusion to reach! And what a comment on the jubilant shouts of those optimistic philosophers who have been telling us how vastly better off we are than any of our ancestors!
Yet these also are right in a certain sense. The most careless reader of history must hug himself for joy to think of the multitude of miseries and oppressions which have disappeared from society in the last few centuries. The inquisition, slavery, trial by torture, the press gang, are but a few of them. At that time the fate and the happiness of the individual were in the hands of priests and kings and nobles; now, thank Heaven! in most countries, especially in our own, they are chiefly in the control of the individual himself.
Nevertheless, it is quite possible in a given state of society that general evils may diminish while personal suffering increases, owing to an undue exaltation of sensitiveness, a sort of moral hyperesthesia, together with the multiplication of desires beyond the means of satisfying them. This is, in fact, the condition of modern society; and these traits, together with its instability and rapid changes, and the bitter competition instigated by its enlarged freedom, have unquestionably very greatly diminished the amount of happiness which might have been expected from the ameliorations of the last few centuries.
There is but one remedy which will be of permanent avail, and that is to educate