Page:The Works of John Locke - 1823 - vol 01.djvu/338

 262 else: for we producing nothing by our willing it but some action in our power, it is there the will terminates, and reaches no farther.

§ 41. If it be farther asked, what it is moves desire? I answer. Happiness, and that alone. Happiness and misery are the names of two extremes, the utmost bounds whereof we know not; it is what "eye hath not seen, ear not heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive." But of some degrees of both we have very lively impressions, made by several instances of delight and joy on the one side, and torment and sorrow on the other; which, for shortness sake, I shall comprehend under the names of pleasure and pain, there being pleasure and pain of the mind as well as the body: "with him is fulness of joy and pleasure for evermore." Or, to speak truly, they are all of the mind; though some have their rise in the mind from thought, others in the body from certain modifications of motion.

§ 42. Happiness, then, in its full extent, is the utmost pleasure we are capable of, and misery the utmost pain: and the lowest degree of what can be called happiness is so much ease from all pain, and so much present pleasure, as without which any one cannot be content. Now because pleasure and pain are produced in us by the operation of certain objects, either on our minds or our bodies, and in different degrees, therefore what has an aptness to produce pleasure in us is that we call good, and what is apt to produce pain in us we call evil, for no other reason but for its aptness to produce pleasure and pain in us, wherein consists our happiness and misery. Farther, though what is apt to produce any degree of pleasure be in itself good, and what is apt to produce any degree of pain be evil, yet it often happens that we do not call it so when it comes in competition with a greater of its sort; because when they come in competition, the degrees also of pleasure