Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/671

 refined hedonistic ideal of life, according to which all irksome sense of duty will melt away in a rational cultivation of choice delights; and now a leading philosopher has added the weight of his name to this tendency of ethical thought by distinctly enforcing the duty of compassing a pleasurable existence, a duty which he thinks to be sadly neglected in these days.

The arguments put forth by Mr. Herbert Spencer in his latest volume, "The Data of Ethics," in support of the proposition that the cultivation of pleasurable consciousness is a prime duty of life, will be sure to excite a good deal of attention. His fundamental idea is that pleasure is good, because it is the accompaniment and mark of a healthy exercise of a useful or life-preserving function. Pleasures and pains have been attached to actions beneficial and injurious to the organism by the working of the laws of evolution. Since it is an inevitable law of our mental nature that we should seek pleasure, and since, too, it is a condition of self-preservation and survival in the struggle for existence that our actions should tend to organic efficiency, it follows that the coincidence of pleasurable and life-serving activities must from the first have been a necessary condition of permanent existence. Mr. Spencer thinks that people have altogether overlooked this truth. Even moralists who might be supposed to know better have, he conceives, failed to recognize the function of pleasurable feelings as guides to sound living. Men are excused, if not commended, when, in pursuit of some worthy distant object, they pay no heed to the bodily pain which should have told them that they were not fulfilling the first conditions of all efficient action. Again, pleasure is to be recommended as directly effecting an increase of energy, bodily and mental, as raising "the tide of life"; yet moralists have altogether forgotten this when pronouncing their sweeping condemnations of pleasure as evil, or at least as of no moral value. Mr. Spencer appears to feel a genuine abhorrence of the ascetic conception of pleasure, for he speaks of the "tacit assumption, common to pagan stoics and Christian ascetics, that we are so diabolically organized that pleasures are injurious and pains beneficial." He does not attempt, as an evolutionist very well might have done, to account for the genesis and survival of the ascetic doctrine. Later on he dwells at some length on the importance of a due pursuit of individual enjoyment as a preliminary to an effective rendering of services to others. In this way he would erect the study of pleasure into a double obligation—a duty to one's self and to others.

Most readers will allow that there is much force in Mr. Spencer's reasonings. It may be doubted, however, whether the common neglect of pleasure as a good thing proceeds as much from lingering ascetic ideas as he supposes. In their severer form these ideas are confined to a few religious sects, and even among them they are not now enforced so rigorously as formerly. It is to be added that the