THE DUTY OF ENJOYMENT. 641 



refined hedonistic ideal of life, according to which all irksome sense of 

 duty will melt away in a rational cultivation of choice delights ; and 

 now a leading philosopher has added the weight of his name to this 

 tendency of ethical thought by distinctly enforcing the duty of com- 

 passing a pleasurable existence, a duty which he thinks to be sadly 

 neglected in these days. 



The arguments put forth by Mr. Herbert Spencer in his latest 

 volume, " The Data of Ethics," in support of the proposition that the 

 cultivation of pleasurable consciousness is a prime duty of life, will 

 be sure to excite a good deal of attention. His fundamental idea is 

 that pleasure is good, because it is the accompaniment and mark of a 

 healthy exercise of a useful or life-preserving function. Pleasures and 

 pains have been attached to actions beneficial and injurious to the 

 organism by the working of the laws of evolution. Since it is an 

 inevitable law of our mental nature that we should seek pleasure, and 

 since, too, it is a condition of self-preservation and survival in the 

 struggle for existence that our actions should tend to organic efl&- 

 ciency, it follows that the coincidence of pleasurable and life-serving 

 activities must from the first have been a necessary condition of per- 

 manent existence. Mr. Spencer thinks that people have altogether 

 overlooked this truth. Even moralists who might be supposed to 

 know better have, he conceives, failed to recognize the function of 

 pleasurable feelings as guides to sound living. Men are excused, if 

 not commended, when, in pursuit of some worthy distant object, they 

 pay no heed to the bodily pain which should have told them that they 

 were not fulfilling the first conditions of all efficient action. Again, 

 pleasure is to be recommended as directly effecting an increase of 

 energy, bodily and mental, as raising " the tide of life " ; yet moralists 

 have altogether forgotten this when pronouncing their sweeping con- 

 demnations of pleasure as evil, or at least as of no moral value. Mr. 

 Spencer appears to feel a genuine abhorrence of the ascetic conception 

 of pleasure, for he speaks of the " tacit assumption, common to pagan 

 stoics and Christian ascetics, that we are so diabolically organized that 

 pleasures are injurious and pains beneficial." He does not attempt, as 

 an evolutionist very well might have done, to account for the genesis 

 and survival of the ascetic doctrine. Later on he dwells at some 

 length on the importance of a due pursuit of individual enjoyment as 

 a preliminary to an effective rendering of services to others. In this 

 way he would erect the study of pleasure into a double obligation — a 

 duty to one's self and to others. 



Most readers will allow that there is much force in Mr. Spencer's 

 reasonings. It may be doubted, however, whether the common neg- 

 lect of pleasure as a good thing proceeds as much from lingering 

 ascetic ideas as he supposes. In their severer form these ideas are 

 confined to a few religious sects, and even among them they are not 

 now enforced so rigorously as formerly. It is to be added that the 



VOL. XVI. — 41 



