of an experience and the impulse to welcome it will thereby be
disclosed. We find, however, that pleasure suffuses certain states of
mind and pain others; which is another way of saying that, for no
reason, we love the first and detest the second. The polemic which
certain moralists have waged against pleasure and in favour of pain is
intelligible when we remember that their chief interest is edification,
and that ability to resist pleasure and pain alike is a valuable virtue
in a world where action and renunciation are the twin keys to happiness.
But to deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil is a grotesque
affectation: it amounts to giving "good" and "evil" artificial
definitions and thereby reducing ethics to arbitrary verbiage. Not only
is good that adherence of the will to experience of which pleasure is
the basal example, and evil the corresponding rejection which is the
very essence of pain, but when we pass from good and evil in sense to
their highest embodiments, pleasure remains eligible and pain something
which it is a duty to prevent. A man who without necessity deprived any
person of a pleasure or imposed on him a pain, would be a contemptible
knave, and the person so injured would be the first to declare it, nor
could the highest celestial tribunal, if it was just, reverse that
sentence. For it suffices that one being, however weak, loves or abhors
anything, no matter how slightly, for that thing to acquire a
proportionate value which no chorus of contradiction ringing through all
the spheres can ever wholly abolish. An experience good or bad in itself
remains so for ever, and its inclusion in a more general order of things
can only change that totality proportionately to the ingredient
absorbed, which will infect the mass, so far as it goes, with its own
colour. The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being
equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more
pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign is its total
temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for