er the sun, and beheld the tears of such as were oppressed and
had no comforter, therefore praised the dead which are already dead more
than the living which are yet alive, and declared him better than both,
which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done
under the sun. Those who are willing to trick their understandings and
play fast and loose with words may, if they please, console themselves
with the fatuous commonplaces of a philosophic optimism. They may, with
eyes tight shut, cling to the notion that they live in the best of all
possible worlds, or discerning all the anguish that may be compressed
into threescore years and ten, still try to accept the Stoic's paradox
that pain is not an evil. Or, most wonderful and most common of all,
they may find this joy of which they talk, in meditating on the moral
perfections of the omnipotent Being for whose diversion the dismal
panorama of all the evil work done under the sun was bidden to unfold
itself, and who sees that it is very good. Those who are capable of a
continuity of joyous emotion on these terms may well complain of Mr.
Mill's story as dreary; and so may the school of Solomon, who commended
mirth because a man hath no better thing than to eat and to drink and to
be merry. People, however, who are prohibited by their intellectual
conditions from finding full satisfaction either in spiritual raptures
or in pleasures of sense, may think the standard of happiness which Mr.
Mill sought and reached, not unacceptable and not unworthy of being
diligently striven after.

Mr. Mill's conception of happiness in life is more intelligible if we
contrast it with his father's. The Cynic element in James Mill, as his
son now tells us (pg. 48), was that he had scarcely any belief in
pleasures; he thought few of them worth the price which has to be paid
for them; and he set down the greater number of the miscarriages in life
as due to an excessive estimate of them. 'He thought human life a poor
thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity
had gone by.... He would sometimes say that if life were made what it
might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth
having; but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that
possibility.' We should shrink from calling even this theory dreary,
associated as it is with the rigorous enforcement of the heroic virtues
of temperance and moderation, and the strenuous and