Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/491

Rh meaning is there in the statement that it will not be achieved when made the immediate object? One who was thus admonished might properly rejoin: "You say I shall not get happiness if I make it the object of pursuit? Suppose then I do not make it the object of my pursuit; shall I get it? If I do, then your admonition amounts to this, that I shall obtain it better if I proceed in some other way than that I adopt. If I do not get it, then I remain without happiness if I follow your way, just as much as if I follow my own, and nothing is gained." An illustration will best show how the matter stands. To a tyro in archery the instructor says: "Sir, you must not point your arrow directly at the target; if you do, you will inevitably miss it; you must aim high above the target, and you may then possibly pierce the bull's eye." What now is implied by the warning and the advice? Clearly that the purpose is to hit the target. Otherwise there is no sense in the remark that it will be missed if directly aimed at; and no sense in the remark that to be hit, something higher must be aimed at. Similarly with happiness. There is no sense in the remark that happiness will not be found if it is directly sought, unless happiness is a thing to be somehow or other obtained.

"Yes; there is sense," I hear it said. "Just as it may be that the target is not the thing to be hit at all, either by aiming directly or indirectly at it, but that some other thing is to be hit; so it may be that the thing to be achieved immediately or remotely is not happiness at all, but some other thing: the other thing being duty." In answer to this the admonished man may reasonably say: "What then is meant by Kant's statement that the man who pursues happiness 'fails of true satisfaction'? All happiness is made up of satisfactions. The 'true satisfaction' which Kant offers as an alternative, must be some kind of happiness; and if a truer satisfaction, must be a greater or better happiness; and better must mean on the average, and in the long run, greater. If this 'true satisfaction' does not mean greater happiness of self—distant if not proximate, in another life if not in this life—and if it does not mean greater happiness by achieving the happiness of others; then you propose to me as an end a smaller happiness instead of a greater, and I decline it."

So that in this professed repudiation of happiness as an end, there lies the inavoidable implication that it is the end.

This last consideration introduces us naturally to another of Kant's cardinal doctrines. That there may be no mistake in my representation of it, I must make a long quotation.

"I omit here all actions which are already recognized as inconsistent with duty, although they may be useful for this or that purpose, for with these the