the fact, that in at least the English language the words to express what is good and pleasurable are fewer by great deal than those for the bad and painful. We have colours to paint every shade of wickedness, and strokes for every stage of woe: let the crime be the blackest, we can give it a name; let the cup be the bitterest, we can tell of the very lees. But to tell of the varying lights of pleasure, and all the winning ways of goodness, we are wholly at a loss; and the most we can say of the greatest goodness is, that there is an unknown, indescribable charm about it; the most we can say of the highest bliss, that it is unutterable.

Whether this be owing to that vein of sadness which runs through the whole Saxon mind, or whether it be a difference traceable in all languages alike, we need not at present stay to inquire. It is enough to remark the failures that have always and everywhere been made in defining happiness. Very many who have defined it, like those who have defined poetry, tell not what is, but what gives happiness, or that short happiness called pleasure. Thus Helvetius wrote a poem showing that it lies in the cultivation of letters and the fine arts. Those, again, who have truly attempted a definition of the feeling itself, have often made it dark and loose, and always awanting. A good reason will afterwards be forthcoming why in our notions of happiness, as in those of poetry, we have ever been and still are to seek, and may never reach a perfect knowledge of all,

and especially of its higher, manifestations. Meanwhile must be given as full an explanation of it as lies in our power; and this I shall endeavour to do, overlooking entirely the outward circumstances favourable to it, health, wealth, and the like, which are so thoroughly accidental that as Clement of Rome has well said—often the very abundance of those things which we hope and run after, becomes at once the fire and the fuel (TÓDeois kaì vλn) of all that we dread and shun. We must confine ourselves to inward and necessary conditions.

Pleasure, then, may be defined to be―The harmonious and unconscious activity of the soul. This definition recognises three great laws, which are to be considered in their order.

B

CHAPTER I.

THE LAW OF ACTIVITY.

In the first place, Enjoyment is an Activity. This is very clear, and is a very old doctrine. Aristotle, for instance, (N. Ethics, ix. 9, sec. 5) says that it is an energy-ἡ εὐδαιμονία ἐνέργειά τίς ἐστιν. In like manner, Hobbes makes it a motion, which indeed expresses our whole idea of activity. Dugald Stewart, however, in reckoning the various pleasures which go to make up happiness, while he gives Activity the first rank, places beside it the pleasures of sense, of imagination, of the understanding, and of the heart, as if in these there were no activity. It is quite evident that all these pleasures are but particular kinds of action.

But when action is said to be a law of pleasure, something more is meant than that all enjoyment is active; it is of course meant that the amount of enjoyment is measured by the degree of activity. The only happiness which seems to outlie the pale of this rule, is that of tranquillity, or rest. Rest, however, is very far from death, or stoppage, or listless ease; it is but the

lull of strife, hurry, toil, strain, and not only admits of the greatest activity, but is the very condition of its existence. As railway motion is not only easy, but quick; as an eagle goes sailing athwart the sun with the swiftness of wind, and yet calm as a slumberer; as this ball of earth is rolled through the skies with speed. at the uttermost, and yet seems as wafted with the softness of a feather on the gentle breath of evening; as wide nature, however still she may appear, is stirring ever and everywhere around us with unimaginable power; so the mind, for all its hush, may be up doing at once with the strength of a giant, and the nimbleness of a fairy. On the other hand, it may perchance be fast asleep or sluggish in its movements, but assuredly, in such a case, there is very little pleasure going.

and

It is, indeed, a very common mistake to oppose rest and action.

"Some place the bliss in action, some in ease,"

are the words of Pope, as if action might not be full of ease. Young makes even a much wider separation between the two.

He says,

"Without employ,

The soul is on a rack, the rack of rest,

To souls most adverse; action all their joy."

Many also mistake the day of rest for a day of idleness; and in the same spirit, Hobbes, while he places the

felicity of this life in action, denies it repose, and declares that the joys of the next are to us upon earth utterly incomprehensible; he means, because they are said in Scripture to partake so much of rest. (Leviathan, § 11, compared with § 6.) This is in strange contrast with the very intelligible tortures which, for a heresy that he never held, and that is said to render the heretic worse than any devil, to wit, the denial of a God, John Bunyan, in his Vision of Hell, made the philosopher of Malmesbury not only undergo, but also most learnedly describe, the tortures of a fire quite unlike "culinary fire,” as he calls it, putting into the mouth of a philosopher a phrase peculiarly acceptable to a tinker. Yet, perhaps, with Hobbes, it is rather a misuse of words than anything else; for, by "the repose of a mind satisfied," he afterwards explains himself to mean "desire at an end, sense and imagination at a stand." When he speaks of repose and tranquillity in this sense, we may fall in with what he says, but have a right to fall out with his language. Greatly should we wrong those sages who have placed happiness in the quiet of the mind, were we to understand them thus. Socrates had no such idea as the sophist supposed who charged him with placing happiness in the stillness of a stone: he but objected to that unsettled enjoyment which to him appeared nothing better than an itch. Even those-the Brahmins-who push the doctrine to the furthest extreme, making it the highest happiness to sit still and think of nothing, cannot be so