s said) along the line of least resistance.
Certain conduct is intrinsically pleasurable or painful, and the
future pleasure only acts through the present foretaste. When,
however, we regard the pleasure as future and as somehow a separable
thing, we can only express these undeniable facts by accepting a
purely egoistic conclusion. We are, of course, moved by our own
feelings, as we breathe with our own lungs and digest with our own
stomachs. But when we accept the doctrine of 'ends' this harmless and
self-evident truth is perverted into the statement that our 'end' must
be our own pleasure; that we cannot be really or directly unselfish.
The analysis, indeed, is so defective that it can hardly be applied
intelligibly. Hume observes that no man would rest his foot
indifferently upon a stool or a gouty toe. The action itself of giving
pain would be painful, and cannot be plausibly resolved into an
anticipation of an 'end.' This, again, is conspicuously true of all
the truly social emotions. Not only the conscience, but the sense of
shame or honour, or pride and vanity act powerfully and
instantaneously as present motives without necessary reference to any
future results. The knowledge that I am giving pain or causing future
pain is intrinsically and immediately painful to the normal human
being, and the supposed 'analysis' is throughout a fiction. Mill,
however, like Bentham, takes it for granted, but perceives more
clearly than Bentham the difficulty to which it leads. How, from a
theory of pure selfishness, are we to get a morality of general
benevolence? The answer is given by the universal 'association.' We
are governed, he holds, by our own emotions; our end is our own
pleasure, and we have to consider how this end dictates a desire for
general happiness. He expounds with great vigour the process by which
the love of friends, children and parents and country may be gradually
developed through the association of our pleasures with the
fellow-creatures who caused them. J. S. Mill regards his exposition as
'almost perfect,'[607] and says that it shows how the 'acquired
sentiments'--the moral sentiments and so forth--may be gradually
developed; may become 'more intense and powerful than any of the
elements out of which they may have been formed, and may also in their
maturity be perfectly disinterested.' James Mill declares that the
analysis does not affect the reality of the sentiments analysed.
Gratitude remains grati