The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Studies and Strowings. Daniel G. Brinton

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СКАЧАТЬ ignorance or the disregard of this fact has led to the ruin of more individual lives, and to more fatal misfortunes to the race, than any other error whatsoever. The poison of all false religions and philosophies lies either in condemning pleasure or in commending low forms of it; and the one is as hurtful as the other. The religion which to-day numbers more believers than any other, Buddhism, aims its loftiest aspirations to the extinction of all desire and the abolition of all enjoyment. These are the words of Buddha himself:—

      “Let no man look for what is pleasant; for not to find it is pain.

      “Let no man love anything; for the loss of the beloved is sorrow.

      “After pleasure follows grief, and from affection comes fear.

      “I have run through many births, and painful it is to be born again and again; but now, O Thou Builder of this house, Thou hast been seen, and not again shalt Thou rebuild it. The mind has attained to the extinction of all desire.”

      This is the ideal of happiness that four hundred millions of human beings hold before their minds to-day. If there is any truth in the modern philosophy which teaches that pleasure lies in functional activity, no more pernicious message could be commended to mankind than that which Buddha brought.

      He is far from the only preacher of such a gospel. “To rest in peace,” “to sleep in the Lord,”—is not this the religious hope and aspiration of millions of Christians? It is not a whit higher than the Nirvana of the Buddhist.

      The avoidance of pain is the lowest form of happiness; more correctly, it is its mere negative, and scarcely deserves to rank as one of its grades. Yet, alas! to how many millions is it the highest form imagined! To how many is the only escape from unhappiness to forget themselves! This is the cause of that thirst for intoxicants and narcotics which undermines and infects modern society. Dr. Johnson would still find the multitude agree with him in his opinion, that a man is never happy except when he is drunk!

      Those Quietists who preach tranquillity and contentment as the goal which all should seek are but one step higher. Indifference to pleasure, or a reduction of the number of pleasures, is a sign of weakening of the reason and of a retrogression in development. No man has a right to be happy because he is contented; though he may well be contented because he is happy. To be “void of strong desire,” set free from hope and fear, snugly harbored from all storms of feeling, so far from being the condition of the sage, is the aspiration of the fool. Keen sensations awaken the sentiments, emotions fertilize the intellect, passions educate the reason. The brute goes through life without a smile or a tear; man’s proud privilege is to weep and to laugh.

      The ancients taught that philosophical happiness is to want little, and that it is the error of the vulgar to want much and to enjoy many things. The truer doctrine is that happiness is expansion and growth, the enriching of our natures by manifold experiences, and the securing this by the multiplication of our desires. The avoidance of pain and the limitation of our hopes to our powers are sometimes valuable preliminaries to the pursuit of happiness, but are not always essential to it, and in many instances an over-solicitude about them destroys all chance for a higher felicity. Happiness does not come of itself. It has to be worked for, fought for; and courage and endurance are as necessary in this as in any other struggle. In the path of every pilgrim to the Celestial City stand from time to time the giant figures of Death and Pain, and shake their spears, saying, “Wilt thou dare?”

      The sources of pleasure should, therefore, be multiplied to the utmost, and they should be classified, so that undue value should not be assigned any one class. Theoretically, there is nothing troublesome about this; practically, it is often an insurmountable difficulty. The pleasures of the senses are inferior to those of the emotions, and these in turn are ranked by the enjoyments which pertain to the exercise of the intellectual powers. No one of these can wholly exclude the others. They are all inseparably united in the individual entity; but the individual can enjoy only with the faculties he possesses, and in proportion to their relative strength. It is as absurd to ask more of him, as it were to invite the gouty to a foot race, or the blind to admire the colors in a painting.

      It is well to establish and to recognize this hierarchy of enjoyments, beginning with those of the sensations common to animal life everywhere and culminating in those of pure reason, whose crowning felicity is the pursuit of truth; it has been done, and well done, by many writers; but what has been generally overlooked is that this scheme can have small practical application to the conduct of life if it is not fully recognized that no one of these roads to happiness can be successfully pursued while the others are neglected, or branded with the sign, “Entrance forbidden.”

      This is where Asceticism has committed its fatal blunder, and for thousands of years has made miserable the lives of millions. Instead of self-control, it has demanded self-abnegation; instead of the due and proportioned exercise of all the powers, it has ordered the absolute disuse of some of them; quite as often of the highest as of the lowest, of reason as often as lust. Under this baleful doctrine nations have become misshapen in mind, atrophied in culture, distorted from honest nature’s rule, mean, miserable, and inefficient. Yet this same doctrine is preached to-day from thousands of pulpits in lands of highest civilization. Is it not time for the common sense of most to rise in protest against such a survival from the Dark Ages of the life of the race? Reason blushes only for pleasures which she cannot explain, and he who acquaints himself with the whole nature of man knows that all his powers and faculties have their appropriate use. The ascetic may claim a happiness all his own; but so do the extravagant and the vicious; both stand condemned before the results of their own successes.

      The intellect has no right to chide the enjoyments of the senses. Pleasures differ in degree and permanence, but not in kind. As pleasures they are on a par, whether derived from objects of sense, from the emotions, or from the understanding. Such analysts of mind as Kant and Epictetus agree that there is no essential distinction between the most refined and the coarsest gratifications. “It is one and the same vital force expressing itself in the Desires, which is affected by all objects which cause Pleasure.”

IV. The Distribution of Happiness.

       Table of Contents

      Having reached an understanding about what happiness means, and some notion as to its various grades, it will next be worth while to study its distribution in the several classes of society, in contrasting grades of civilization, in the two sexes, and at various ages. This will be dealing with the subject according to the methods of natural science, and it ought to lead to some interesting conclusions.

      One might expect to find a general agreement as to the main facts. Far from it. The common belief is that happiness increases with the means, or at least with the capacity, for happiness. It is this belief which inspires men to labor for the means and improve their capacities. But the philosophers nowise concede its correctness. Hume argued that all who are happy are equally happy; and Paley maintained that happiness is about equally distributed among all orders of the community; that the plowman gets as much real enjoyment out of life as the philosopher, and the beggar at the gate as much as the monarch on the throne. To which Dr. Johnson replied that a small glass and a large one might be equally full, but the latter holds more. The capacity, he justly argued, of the philosopher to receive a multiplicity of agreeable impressions is greater than that of the peasant, and therefore, other things being equal, the quantity of his enjoyment will be greater.

       The learned Doctor, indeed, sometimes insisted that felicity increases directly with the means of enjoyment. Representing the latter by money, he would say that a man with six thousand pounds a year should be ten times as happy as the one with six hundred a year; and if he is not, it is because he is an ass.

      Here he was certainly СКАЧАТЬ