creations into the book of common life.
They make space, and give time. Their exertions are of the highest
value, so long as they confine their administration of the concerns of
the inferior powers of our nature within the limits due to the
superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions,
let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced,
the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. Whilst
the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labour,
let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence
with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not
tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the
extremes of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, 'To him
that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little
that he hath shall be taken away.' The rich have become richer, and
the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven
between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are
the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the
calculating faculty.

It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the
definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an
inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature,
the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of
the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair
itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the
highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this
principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure
which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which
is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in
sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. And hence the
saying, 'It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to the
house of mirth.' Nor that this highest species of pleasure is
necessarily linked with pain. The delight of love and friendship, the
ecstasy of the admiration of nature, the joy of the perception and
still more of the creation of poetry, is often wholly unalloyed.

The production and assurance of pleasure in this highest sense is true
utility. Those who produce and preserve this pleasure are poets or
poetical philosophers.

The exertions of Locke, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau,[12] and
their disciple