John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

IMPERFECT DEFINITION OF HAPPINESS.
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certain loose expressions that have received an amount of notice
from hostile critics out of all proportion to their bearing on his
arguments for
Utility. I think that, having opponents at
every point, his proper course was not to commit himself to
any more specific definition of Happiness than his case abso
lutely required.
It was obviously necessary that he should give some expla
nation of Happjness ; and, on his principles, happiness must be
respkedlntQ-pleasureand the absence of pain. Here, however,
hejiad _to encounter at once the common dislike to regarding
pjeasure as the sole .object of desire and pursuit ;
"
a doctrine
worthy only of swine," to which its holders have, both in ancient
and in modern times, been most profusely likened. He cou
rageously faces the difficulty by pronouncing
in favour of a
difference in ./>// or quality among pleasures ; which difference
he expands through two or three eloquent pages, which I
believe have received more aitention from critics on the other
side than all the rest of the book put together. My own\
decided opinion is. that he ought to have resolved all the
so-called nobler or higher pleasures into the one single circum
stance of including, with the agent s pleasure, the pleasure of>^
others. This is the only position that a supporter of Utility
can hold to. There is a superiority attaching to some pleasures
that are still exclusively self-regarding, namely, their amount
as compared with the exhaustion of the nervous power ; the
pleasures of music and of scenery are higher
than those of
But the superiority that makes a distinction \
stimulating drugs.
of quality, that rises clearly and effectually above the swinish
level, is the superiority of the gratifications
that take our fellow-
of affection, qf/
beings along with us : such are the pleasures
benevolence, of duty. To have met opponents upon this
ground alone would have been the proper undertaking for the
object Mill had in view. It surprises me that he has not
ventured upon such a mode of resolving pleasures. He says
" On a question which is the best worth having of two pleasures,
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