Page:An introduction to ethics.djvu/197

 CHAPTER XIII.

VOCATION.

§ 1. Pleasure, Duty, and Happiness. The young child sharply distinguishes between pleasure and duty. What gives it pleasure is the thing it wants to do; while duty always seems to be what it does not want to do. Duty is unpleasant, and pleasure is apt to be undutiful. But the child gradually comes to see that duty is not necessarily externally imposed by some alien power. It realises that it is free, and that it can impose its duties on itself. Similarly, the child begins to recognise that stolen pleasures are not always the sweetest. It comes to understand that it may derive pleasure, not from courses of action that are undutiful, but from the very performance of its duty. The man whose life is well and worthily organised finds that pleasure and duty are not in eternal conflict. His life as a whole is the carrying out of his duty; but his life as a whole is a pleasant one, precisely because it is a life which is loyally devoted to duty. And this is happiness. The happy life is that in which duty is pleasant, and pleasure does not conflict with duty.

Happiness is not mere pleasure. The man or woman whose life is a ceaseless round of pleasure