Fourth, sciences and arts and true opinions.
Fifth, painless pleasures.
Of a sixth class, I have no more to say. Thus, pleasure and mind may
both renounce the claim to the first place. But mind is ten thousand
times nearer to the chief good than pleasure. Pleasure ranks fifth and
not first, even though all the animals in the world assert the contrary.
...
From the days of Aristippus and Epicurus to our own times the nature
of pleasure has occupied the attention of philosophers. 'Is pleasure
an evil? a good? the only good?' are the simple forms which the enquiry
assumed among the Socratic schools. But at an early stage of the
controversy another question was asked: 'Do pleasures differ in kind?
and are some bad, some good, and some neither bad nor good?' There are
bodily and there are mental pleasures, which were at first confused but
afterwards distinguished. A distinction was also made between necessary
and unnecessary pleasures; and again between pleasures which had or had
not corresponding pains. The ancient philosophers were fond of asking,
in the language of their age, 'Is pleasure a "becoming" only, and
therefore transient and relative, or do some pleasures partake of truth
and Being?' To these ancient speculations the moderns have added a
further question:--'Whose pleasure? The pleasure of yourself, or of your
neighbour,--of the individual, or of the world?' This little addition
has changed the whole aspect of the discussion: the same word is now
supposed to include two principles as widely different as benevolence
and self-love. Some modern writers have also distinguished between
pleasure the test, and pleasure the motive of actions. For the universal
test of right actions (how I know them) may not always be the highest or
best motive of them (why I do them).
Socrates, as we learn from the Memorabilia of Xenophon, first drew
attention to the consequences of actions. Mankind were said by him to
act rightly when they knew what they were doing, or, in the language of
the Gorgias, 'did what they would.' He seems to have been the first who
maintained that the good was the useful (Mem.). In his eagerness for
generalization, seeking, as Aristotle says, for the universal in Ethics
(Metaph.), he took the most obvious intellectual aspect of human action
which occurred to him. He meant to emphasize, not pleasure, but the
calculation of pleasure; neither is he arguing that pleasure is the
chief good, but that we
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