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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 energyἡ 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 and 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.

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

understood, inasmuch as the end which they propose is so far beyond our powers, that, in struggling to reach it, the utmost energies of the mightiest minds may be called forth in vain. And equally unwarrantable would it be to put such a meaning on the heavenly rest promised to all believers, and which is akin to that of God himself, who, rest how he may, never slumbereth, but du sein du repos, in the magnificent words of Buffon, from the bosom of repose, with a power unfailing as time, unbounded as space, and swifter than light, journeys ever on, by countless, invisible, arterial ways, to animate and sustain the innumerable constellations that in him alone live, and move, and have their being.

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CHAPTER II.

THE LAW OF HARMONY.

THAT rest, therefore, wherein the highest enjoyment lies, is not inactivity nor stockstillness; it is only another name for the second law of pleasure, which is its Harmony.

By this harmony is understood not only agreement between certain faculties or capacities (Active or Passive Powers), and things fitted to supply their cravings, as between praise and the love of praise, water and thirst; but also such an enlarged agreement, bearing on every thing by which we are surrounded, great or small, far or near, as will reach even to the furthest end of our being, and forbid any the least pin-point of enjoyment which is not in perfect keeping with that end: a concord, not only simple and immediate, but manifold and remotely felt. Without the former concord, there can be no pleasure whatsoever: both together make up that lasting enjoyment which is called happiness.

Pleasure, says Aristotle, is a motion of the soul while it is still and at all points felt settling into its own na

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