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88 Hedonism, or of the seeking happiness in pleasure. Happiness, for the ordinary man, neither means a pleasure nor a number of pleasures. It means in general the finding of himself, or the satisfaction of himself as a whole, and in particular it means the realization of his concrete ideal of life. This is happiness,' he says, not identifying happiness with one pleasure or a number of them, but understanding by it, in this is become fact what I have at heart.' But the Hedonist has said, Happiness is pleasure, and the Hedonist knows that happiness is a whole. How, then, if pleasures make no system, if they are a number of perishing particulars, can the whole that is sought be found in them? It is the old question, how find the universal in mere particulars? And the answer is the old answer, In their sum. The self is to be found, happiness is to be realized, in the sum of the moments of the feeling self. The practical direction is, get all pleasures, and you will have got happiness; and we saw above its well-known practical issue in weariness and dissatisfaction.

The theoretical reason is simple. The sum, or the All of pleasures is a self-contradiction, and therefore the search for it is futile. A series which has no beginning, or, if a beginning, yet no end, can not be summed; there is no All, and yet the All is postulated, and the series is to be summed. But it can not be summed till we are dead, and then, if we have realized it, we, I suppose, do not know it, and we are not happy; and before death we can not have realized it, because there is always more to come, the series is always incomplete. What is the sum of pleasures,