Happiness is, at least for the present, only a subordinate means. Therefore we say: By all means make men happy, so far as their happiness tends to give them and to preserve in them moral insight. True it is, as scientific psychology shows us, that a man, in order to be as good as possible, must generally be possessed of respectable health, of what he thinks a good place in the world, of friends, and of numerous pleasures. He must digest well, he must enjoy the esteem of his fellows, he must be strong, and he must be frequently amused. All this is true, and is in fact a commonplace. When an ascetic denies this, he maintains a pernicious heresy, that tends to destroy moral insight by depriving men of the physical power to get it. But these facts must not be misinterpreted. Whatever might be true of a society in which moral insight had been attained, nothing is plainer than that happiness at the present time cannot be regarded from our point of view as more than a means to the present great end. If we try to amuse our neighbors, to relieve their woes, to improve their worldly estate, we must do so not as if this were the end of the present life, but as workers in a very vast drama of human life, whose far-off purpose must govern every detail. The good Samaritan must say to himself, as he helps the poor wretch by the wayside: "In so far as I realize only this man's need, my purpose is indeed simply to relieve him. But my purpose must be higher than that. This man is not alone, but one of a multitude. My highest aim in helping him is not to make him individually happy, but to increase by this, as by all my acts, the harmony of mankind. Not alone that he may by and by go away and enjoy himself do I help him now, but because by so doing I hope through him to increase among men moral insight." Therefore, notwithstanding Schopenhauer's ridicule, Fichte was right in saying that we ought to treat the individual man not chiefly as an individual, but as an instrument for extending and serving the moral law. Because a certain kind of happiness means efficiency, and efficiency morality, therefore and therefore alone have we the right and duty, in this present generation, to labor for this kind of happiness.

Equally, therefore, it becomes our duty to labor to increase pain, whenever pain is the best means of fostering the moral insight. Therefore, in this present day, it cannot be our duty to labor to diminish pain in the world, simply as pain. Again we must appeal to psychology to guide us aright. The pains that foster moral insight, although limited in number and intensity, are numerous, and still imperfectly defined. It would be a useful task to study more in detail than psychologists have yet done, the moralizing power of pain. This is a task for the psychology of the future. In general, of course, we can say that the range of such pains has been much exaggerated by ascetics. Bodily pain, if severe, is generally brutalizing, at least for most people, and the moral insight is in it only in so far as the past experience of bodily pain helps us to know the significance of the suffering of others, not by giving us that blind emotion of sympathy before criticised, but by giving us the means to form a cool abstract estimate of the value of this evil of physical pain. For thus we can realize the strength of the will that seeks to escape it, and can act with due respect to this will. But nature generally gives us enough experience of pain to furnish excellent material for the calculations needed. Therefore, bodily pains, save as punishments, are seldom useful instruments for our great purpose. Not thus can self be duly mor

tified.

It is different with certain mental pains. All those that tend to make the individual feel his own necessary limitations, and thereby to approach the realization of the great world of life about him, are necessary evils. His will must be overwhelmed, that the Universal Will may have place to establish itself in him. Therefore, without considering whether we are thereby increasing or diminishing the sum of human misery, we all of us unhesitatingly set about the work of contending with blind self-confidence and self-absorption wherever it may appear. Therefore it is right that we ridicule all pretentious mediocrity that is unconscious of its stupidities. Therefore, in fact, it is right that we should criticise unsparingly all pretenders, however much they may be pained by our criticism. Therefore it is well that we should feel not a selfish but a righteous joy whenever pride has a fall, whenever the man who thinks that he is something discovers of a truth that he is nothing. Therefore, also, do we put down excessive forwardness and vanity in growing children, although so to do hurts their sensitive young selfishness very keenly. In all such ways we must ask and we must show no mercy, save when these keen pains of wounded vanity are so given as to inflame and increase this vanity itself. All healthy, truthful criticism of individual limitations is a duty, even if it is a present torture to the individual criticised. For this individual is blind to other life because he is wrapped up in himself. If by showing him his insignificance you can open his eyes, you are bound to do so, even though you make him writhe to see his worthlessness. For what we here defend is not that ill-natured criticism whose only aim is to gratify the miserable self of the critic, but the criticism whose edge is turned in earnest against every form of self-satisfaction that hinders insight. Let a man be self-satisfied when he is at rest, after dinner, or in merry company. It is a harmless and even a useful amusement. But when he is at work doing good he ought to hate self-satisfaction, which hinders the moral insight, which exalts his will above the universal will, which takes the half-done task for the whole task, and altogether glorifies the vanity of vanities. If now my critic rids me of such self-satisfaction, he may hurt me keenly, but he is my best friend. My life may often be miserable in consequence, but then I am an instrument, whose purpose it is to attain, to foster, to extend, and to employ the moral insight. My misery is a drop, evil no doubt in itself (since my poor little will must writhe and struggle when it sees its own vanity and the hopelessness of its separate satisfactions), but a relative good, since through it I may attain to the moral insight. All such pains must be dealt with in the same way. Hence the utilitarian principle of benevolent hedonism, even if right in its application to the far-off future, has but little direct practical application to a life that must to-day be judged by such standards as these.

II.

But has the principle of hedonism any truth even in its application to a world where all had attained the moral insight as an experience? If we consider the higher human activities, whose worth is not merely provisional, but permanent, the activities that men will carry on when they have freed themselves from selfish strife, is the aggregate happiness as such the goal of the action of this unselfish society?

There are existent already among men activities that belong to spheres where selfish strife is, relatively speaking, suppressed. These activities are foreshadowings of the life of the possible future humanity that may come to possess the moral insight. Art, science, philosophy, are the types of such life. These activities form still but a small part of the aggregate work of men, and so it must long be; yet, though subordinated in extent to the pressing moral needs of an imperfect state, these activities are already among the highest in our lives. But now, are they valuable because of the aggregate happiness that they cause, or for some other reason? To judge of this we must study the definition of the second, more permanent class of human duties.

Suppose then that the first and provisional aim of human conduct had been attained, and that all men

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