Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/222

Rh tion at the sight of his success, but for a good deal of coutempt. One sees at once that he is a person of serious limitations. One sees and feels perfections that the other has not. One despises then the other man’s complacency, because it is so plainly founded in illusion. “If he could only see himself as others see him,” one says, “he could not be self-satisfied.” Criticism thus seems to indicate why he ought to be discontented, and why he would, if he knew more, feel a contempt for himself. All such criticism is really an abandonment of the hedonistic principle. If an individual ought to be dissatisfied, although he is actually satisfied, and if he ought to be dissatisfied merely because he has not some perfection that exists in somebody else, then the doctrine that a self reaches its goal in so far as ifc reaches inner contentment is given up. No benevolent hedonist has any business to criticise a happy man who is harming nobody by his happiness. He is at the goal, or approximately so. Let him alone. To do otherwise, by criticising him, is a crime.

But no; every one feels that the true goal is not attained for this man. And this feeling, though in itself as feeling it proves nothing, is the first suggestion to many of some deeper truth. This truth, however, enters like iron into his soid, when somebody else ably and justly and severely criticises him in his turn. Here, for example, I have been for a time content with myself, and have been saying to my soul: “Soul, take thy ease,” and here comes one who says to me, very justly, “Thou fool,” and points out some great lack in my conduct, or in my charac-