so far as they
tend towards happiness, we naturally ask what is meant by 'happiness.'
For the term in the common use of language is only to a certain extent
commensurate with moral good and evil. We should hardly say that a good
man could be utterly miserable (Arist. Ethics), or place a bad man in
the first rank of happiness. But yet, from various circumstances, the
measure of a man's happiness may be out of all proportion to his desert.
And if we insist on calling the good man alone happy, we shall be
using the term in some new and transcendental sense, as synonymous with
well-being. We have already seen that happiness includes the happiness
of others as well as our own; we must now comprehend unconscious as well
as conscious happiness under the same word. There is no harm in this
extension of the meaning, but a word which admits of such an extension
can hardly be made the basis of a philosophical system. The exactness
which is required in philosophy will not allow us to comprehend under
the same term two ideas so different as the subjective feeling of
pleasure or happiness and the objective reality of a state which
receives our moral approval.

Like Protarchus in the Philebus, we can give no answer to the question,
'What is that common quality which in all states of human life we call
happiness? which includes the lower and the higher kind of happiness,
and is the aim of the noblest, as well as of the meanest of mankind?' If
we say 'Not pleasure, not virtue, not wisdom, nor yet any quality which
we can abstract from these'--what then? After seeming to hover for a
time on the verge of a great truth, we have gained only a truism.

Let us ask the question in another form. What is that which constitutes
happiness, over and above the several ingredients of health, wealth,
pleasure, virtue, knowledge, which are included under it? Perhaps we
answer, 'The subjective feeling of them.' But this is very far from
being coextensive with right. Or we may reply that happiness is the
whole of which the above-mentioned are the parts. Still the question
recurs, 'In what does the whole differ from all the parts?' And if we
are unable to distinguish them, happiness will be the mere aggregate of
the goods of life.

Again, while admitting that in all right action there is an element of
happiness, we cannot help seeing that the utilitarian theory supplies
a much easier explanation of some virtues than of others. Of many
patriotic or bene