discriminated. Immoderate pleasure is the forerunner of regret. It is
succeeded by ennui, it is followed by weariness, it ends in disgust:
transient happiness frequently converts itself into durable misfortune.
According to these principles it will be seen that man, who in each
moment of his duration seeks necessarily after happiness, ought, when he
is reasonable, to manage, to husband, to regulate his pleasures; to
refuse himself to all those of which the indulgence would be succeeded
by regret; to avoid those which can convert themselves into pain; in
order that he may procure for himself the most permanent felicity.

Happiness cannot be the same for all the beings of the human species;
the same pleasures cannot equally affect men whose conformation is
different, whose modification is diverse. This no doubt, is the true
reason why the greater number of moral philosophers are so little in
accord upon those objects in which they have made man's happiness
consist, as well as on the means by which it may be obtained.
Nevertheless, in general, happiness appears to be a state, whether
momentary or durable, in which man readily acquiesces, because he finds
it conformable to his being. This state results from the accord, springs
out of the conformity, which is found between himself and those
circumstances in which he has been placed by Nature; or, if it be
preferred, _happiness is the co-ordination of man, with the causes that
give him impulse_.

The ideas which man forms to himself of happiness depend not only on his
temperament, on his individual conformation, but also upon the habits he
has contracted. _Habit_ is, in man, a mode of existence--of thinking--of
acting, which his organs, as well interior as exterior, contract, by the
frequent reiteration of the same motion; from whence results the faculty
of performing these actions with promptitude, of executing them with