Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/164

152 but that he still would not choose death if he had the alternative of being turned into a pig, even an educated and happy pig, I imagine would be hard to disprove satisfactorily. Or take a less extreme case. Many men think, perhaps truly, that childhood was the happiest part of their lives, and they express the sentimental wish that they might once more be transported back into those more felicitous days. But if they actually had the choice, how many would be likely to avail themselves of it? Again, it might perhaps be a question whether artistic development is always accompanied by an increase in the bulk of pleasure one gets from æsthetic objects. A very crude taste may be the source of a very intense pleasure, whereas it often seems as if the growth of critical ability were apt to be marked by a diminution in the genuineness of enjoyment, and the substitution of a rather cold and passionless pleasure of the intellect. But even if he were convinced that there was thus a loss of freshness and vigor in the life of feeling, no critic would be willing to give up his hardly acquired sophistication, and regain intensity of feeling at the expense of having to go back to an uncultivated taste for what he now regards as artistic atrocities.

The ground for this seems evident. It is not that we simply want pleasure, of any and every sort, or even intense and long-continued pleasure, but we want certain kinds of pleasure; and what these are is largely settled for us by the requirements of our constitution. Men, most men that is, are not constituted like pigs, and therefore they cannot really wish themselves into pigs. If they really were pigs they might actually have a pleasanter time of it; but that implies that they already are different from what they are. In deciding whether they want a pig's happiness, on the contrary, it is assumed that the motives on which they judge are the motives of their actual present nature; in imagining themselves changed, they have to imagine in terms of what appeals to them now; and if a pig's happiness does not awake in them a responsive chord, but rather a sense of degradation and disgust, they cannot really wish themselves enjoying it. For them now, as they judge, it wouldn't really be enjoyment. In a general way they want happiness, and if they do not stop