life of pleasure soon palls and becomes unpleasant. Bradley's
objection to pleasure was merely speculative: he found it too "abstract".
To call a pleasure when actually felt an abstraction is an exquisite
absurdity: but pleasure, in its absolute essence, is certainly simple and
indefinable. If instead of enjoying it on the wing, and as an earnest of
the soul's momentary harmony, we attempt to arrest and observe it, we find
it strangely dumb; we are not informed by it concerning its occasion, nor
carried from it by any logical implication to the natural object in which
it might be found. A pure hedonist ought therefore to be rather relieved
if all images lapsed from his consciousness and he could luxuriate in
sheer pleasure, dark and overwhelming. True, such bliss would be rather
inhuman, and of the sort which we rashly assign to the oyster: but why
should a radical and intrepid philosopher be ashamed of that? The
condition of Bradley's Absolute--feeling in which all distinctions are
transcended and merged--seems to be something of that kind; but there
would be a strange irony in attributing this mystical and rapturous ideal
to such ponderous worthies as Mill and Spencer, whose minds were nothing
if not anxious, perturbed, instrumental, and full of respect for
variegated facts, and who were probably incapable of tasting pure pleasure
at all.

But if pleasure, in its pure essence, might really be the highest good for
a mystic who should be lost in it, it would be no guide to a moralist
wishing to control events, and to distribute particular pleasures or
series of pleasures as richly as possible in the world. For this purpose
he would need to understand human nature and its variable functions, in
which different persons and peoples may find their sincere pleasures; and
this knowledge would first lend to his general love of pleasure any point
of application in the governance of life or in benevolent legislation.
Some concrete image of a happy human world would take the place of the
futile truism that pleasure is good and pain evil. This is, of course,
what utilitarian moralists meant to do, and actually did, in so far as
their human sympathies extended, which was not to the highest things; but
it was not what they said, and Bradley had a clear advantage over them in
the war of words. A pleasure is not a programme: it exists here and not
there, for me and for no one else, once and never again. When past, it
leaves the will a