Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/190

Rh side of the “lower” pleasures. Just as if it were not constantly said from that side in every good drinking-song, with a result precisely opposed to Mill’s. In fact Mill is driven in this controversy with imaginary opponents to the worst subterfuge possible for so skilled a thinker, when he at last says that the pleasure which seems the higher of two pleasures to the “most of those who have experienced both” is actually the higher. For thus, to keep up the show of merely interpreting to men their actual will. Mill has to appeal to the opinion of the majority, has to use a purely practical habit of deliberative assemblies for the purpose of deciding a question of theory, and then has most absurdly to declare that a man's experience about his own pleasure is worth nothing as a test of its value unless the majority of his fellows agree with him in his judgment.

In fact all this is benevolent trifling. Men declare at one time one pleasure to be “highest,” that is, most desirable, and at another time they declare another pleasure to be the only desirable one. Different men persist in having different aims. To define their duty by telling them that they all have one aim is wrong. From the point of view of the moral insight all this struggling life becomes one; but that is not because it as yet ceases to struggle, but because the being possessed of the moral insight comes to realize it all at once. For him it is one, because he identifies himself with the struggling aims. He seeks their harmony, and must do so if he have the insight. But they are not in harmony