e is a certain small
amount, such as is marked by being out of the physician's hands, but
implying very little of the energy needed for the labours and the
enjoyment of life. There is a high and resplendent degree that renders
toil easy, and responds to the commonest stimulants, so that enjoyment
cannot be quashed without unusually unfavourable circumstances. The
first kind is widely diffused; the second is very rare, except in the
earlier portion of life. Most men and women, as they pass middle age,
lose the elasticity required for easy and spontaneous enjoyment, and,
even if they keep the appearance of health, have too little animal
spirits for enjoyment under cheap and ordinary excitements.

But there is more to be said. In order to obtain, and to retain, health,
freedom from debt, and a good conscience, there are pre-supposed very
considerable advantages. We cannot continue healthy and out of debt,
unless we have a fair start in life, that is, unless we have a tolerable
provision to begin with; a circumstance that the maxim keeps out of
sight.

Yet farther. The conditions named are of themselves mere negatives; they
imply simply the absence of certain decided causes of
unhappiness--ill-health, poverty, and bad conduct. There is a farther
stealthy assumption, namely, that the individual is placed in a
situation otherwise conducive to happiness. Health, absence of debt, and
a good conscience will not make happiness, under severe or ungenial
toil, irritation, ill-usage, affliction, sorrow,--- even if they could
be long maintained under such circumstances. Nor even, in the case of
exemption from the worst ills of life, can we be happy without some
positive agreeables--family, general society, amusements, and
gratifications. There is a certain degree of loneliness, seclusion,
dulness, that destroys happiness without sapping health, or miming us
into debt and vice.

The maxim, as expressed, professes to aim at happiness, but it more
properly belongs to duty. If we fail in the conditions mentioned, we run
the risk rather of neglecting our duties than of missing our pleasures.
It is not every form of ill-health that makes us miserable; and we may
become seared to debt and ill-conduct, so as to suffer only the
incidental misery of being dunned, which many can take with great
composure.

The definition of happiness by Paley is vague and incomplete; but it
does not omit the positive conditions. After health, Paley enumera