Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/221

196 give him all that he asks for himself, you would have reached the goal for him. But now, if all this is a delusion, if in fact a man does not really want his own satisfaction alone, but does actually want something more, that is not his individual satisfaction, and that is not to be attained through his satisfaction, then the hedonistic ideal does not express the truth of life. And this paradoxical experience we all get, sooner or later. We find that our little self does desire something that, if gained, would be not its own satisfaction at all, but its own destruction in its separate life as this self. So the aim of life cannot be ultimately hedonistic. For, if possessed of the moral insight, we cannot will that each self should get the greatest possible aggregate of separate satisfactions, when in truth no one of the selves seeks merely an aggregate of self-satisfactions as such, but when each does seek something else that is unattainable in the form of separate self-satisfaction.

But possibly a reader may incredulously demand where the proof is of this self-contradictory desire that all the selves are declared to have. The proof lies in the general fact that to be fully conscious of one’s own individual life as such is to be conscious of a distressing limitation. This limitation every one very shrewdly notices for the first in other people. The knowledge of it expresses itself in personal criticism. One first puts the matter very naïvely thus, that, whereas the rule of life for one’s own person is simply to get all the satisfaction that one can, the appearance of anybody else who pretends to be content with himself must be the signal not for admira-