Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/188

 176 HENRY SIDGWICK: fore they are not in any sense permanent or " abiding," so that no amount of them can give real satisfaction to a moral agent, and constitute his true good. The pleasure-seeker, like the " animal soul," is " no sooner sated than wanting," the satisfaction of any particular desire is no sooner attained than a desire, similar or different, emerges again ; and there- fore true self-satisfaction is not attained ; the effort of the moral agent does not " find rest ". Now, I have given this argument which Green urges with' a very impressive earnestness of conviction my best consideration ; and I am obliged to conclude that there must be very fundamental differences in the constitution of moral agents, if I may be allowed to count myself one. For if I understand what Green means by " rest," I can only say that I desire it as little as I expect it, in this life or in any other. The happiness that I have enjoyed has been con- ditioned by the perpetual presence or rather the continually fresh emergence of desire ; and whether this condition is to be referred to the " animal soul " or not. I have no aver- sion to it and do not aspire to be independent of it. I recognise this dislike of desire and this contempt for tran- sient satisfactions which Green expresses as characteristic of the conscious experience of certain meditative minds ; but I can confidently deny that these feelings are necessary or universal, and I have no adequate ground for regarding them as even common among human beings generally. I admit that men frequently, under the influence of strong desire, are liable to the illusion that the agreeable " repose of a mind satisfied " will be at least a comparatively permanent conse- quence of attaining the desired object, and are temporarily disappointed when they find that this is not the case ; but neither the expectation nor the disappointment is inevitable or universal : indeed, they seem to me rather experiences of the immature mind, which riper reflection on the relation of desire to life tends to suppress. The man who has philo- sophised himself into so serious a quarrel with the conditions "of human existence that he cannot be satisfied with the prospect of never-ending bliss, because its parts have to be the ethical use of the term, ought to mean something to which we gradually get nearer and nearer some sort of goal or consummation. But all that 1, and (I conceive) most ethical writers, mean by the term is an object of rational aim whether attained in successive parts or not which is not sought as a means to the attainment of any ulterior object, but for itself. And so long as any one's prospective balance of pleasure over pain admits of being made greater or less by immediate action in one way or another which Green does not deny there seems no reason why ' Maximum Hap- piness ' should not provide a serviceable criterion of good.