g
of satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it
consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of
existence. It follows, therefore, that the happiness of any given life
is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to
which it has been free from suffering--from positive evil. If this
is the true standpoint, the lower animals appear to enjoy a happier
destiny than man. Let us examine the matter a little more closely.

However varied the forms that human happiness and misery may take,
leading a man to seek the one and shun the other, the material basis
of it all is bodily pleasure or bodily pain. This basis is very
restricted: it is simply health, food, protection from wet and cold,
the satisfaction of the sexual instinct; or else the absence of these
things. Consequently, as far as real physical pleasure is concerned,
the man is not better off than the brute, except in so far as the
higher possibilities of his nervous system make him more sensitive to
every kind of pleasure, but also, it must be remembered, to every kind
of pain. But then compared with the brute, how much stronger are the
passions aroused in him! what an immeasurable difference there is in
the depth and vehemence of his emotions!--and yet, in the one case,
as in the other, all to produce the same result in the end: namely,
health, food, clothing, and so on.

The chief source of all this passion is that thought for what is
absent and future, which, with man, exercises such a powerful
influence upon all he does. It is this that is the real origin of
his cares, his hopes, his fears--emotions which affect him much
more deeply than could ever be the case with those present joys
and sufferings to which the brute is confined. In his powers of
reflection, memory and foresight, man possesses, as it were, a machine
for condensing and storing up his pleasures and his sorrows. But the
brute has nothing of the kind; whenever it is in pain, it is as though
it were suffering for the first time, even though the same thing
should have previously happened to it times out of number. It has
no power of summing up its feelings. Hence its careless and placid
temper: how much it is to be envied! But in man reflection comes in,
with all the emotions to which it gives rise; and taking up the same
elements of pleasure and pain which are common to him and the brute,
it develops his susceptibility to happiness and misery to