GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

414
*
ETHICS
deliverances of the moral sense, and it is the attempt to
resolve the conflict between theory and experience that
leads to inconsistencies which would not otherwise have
passed the intellectual censorship of so acute a thinker
as Mill.
Mill was not alone in failing to observe the flaw in the
argument that seeks to establish higher and lower qualities
of pleasure. Dr. Johnson was guilty of the same fallacy, as
witness the following quotation from Boswell:
"'Sir, that all who are happy, are equally happy, is not
true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied,
but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity
of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for
having equal happiness with a philosopher.'
"I remember/' Boswell continues, "this very question
very -happily illustrated in opposition to Hume, by the
Reverend Mr. Robert Brown at Utrecht. 'A small drink-
ing glass and a large one/ he said, "may be equally full;
but the large one holds more than the small.' "
.
THAT THERE ARE NOT DIFFERENT KINDS OF
HAPPINESS. Now the argument outlined above 1 does,
I think, convincingly show that it is not a greater
capacity for happiness that the philosopher possesses, but
a greater capacity for the appreciation of values other
than that of happiness. That the state of the philosopher
is more valuable than that of the peasant may be true,
but there is not the faintest reason to suppose that he is,
therefore, more capable of happiness of the same kind as
the happiness that the peasant enjoys. Yet, if the arguments
already given 1 are valid, there cannot be differences in
kinds or qualities of happiness, but only in degrees of
happiness.
The various attempts which have been made to show
that higher, or more refined, or more elevated happiness
is happier than lower, less refined, or less elevated happiness,
are all guilty of the same error; they all, that is to say,
1 and ' See above, pp. 410-412.