always to be attained. If we would escape the pain of unsatisfied desire, we must reduce our desires. Fortune is to be feared, even when bringing gifts; for she is capricious, and may at any moment withhold her gifts. Let us give as few hostages to fortune, then, as we can; let us assert our independence of her, and, in our own selfsufficiency, become indifferent to her fickle moods. Let us return, as far as may be, to the state of nature,' since nature's wants are few. "Of desires some are natural, and some are groundless; and of the natural, some are necessary as well as natural, and some are natural only. And of the necessary desires, some are necessary if we are to be happy, and some if the body is to remain unperturbed, and some if we are even to live. By the clear and certain understanding of these things we learn to make every preference and aversion, so that the body may have health and the soul tranquillity, seeing that this is the sum and end of a blessed life. For the end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear; and when once we have attained this, all the tempest of the soul is laid, seeing that the living creature has not to go to find something that is wanting, or to seek something else by which the good of the soul and of the body will be fulfilled. When we need pleasure, is when we are grieved because of the absence of pleasure; but when we feel no pain, then we no longer stand in need of pleasure." 1

The great maxim of the Epicurean life is, therefore, like that of the Stoic, that we cultivate a temper of indifference to pleasure and pain, such a tranquillity of soul (arapatía) as no assault of fortune can avail to disturb, such an inner peace of spirit as shall make us independent of fortune's freaks. For the Epicureans have lost the Socratic faith in a divine Providence, the counterpart of human prudence, which secures that a well-planned life shall be successful in attaining its goal of pleasure. Their gods have retired from the world, and become careless of

1 Letter of Epicurus, loc. cit.

human affairs. The true wisdom, then, is to break the bonds that link our destiny with the world's, and to assert our independence of fate. Through moderation of desire and tranquillity of soul, we become masters of our own destiny, and learn that our true good is to be sought within rather than without. It is our fear of external evil or calamity, not calamity itself, that is the chief source of pain. Let us cease to fear that which in itself

is not terrible. Even death, the greatest of so-called evils, the worst of all the blows which fortune can inflict upon us, is an evil only to him who fears it; even to it we can become indifferent. "Accustom thyself in the belief that death is nothing to us; for good and evil are only where they are felt, and death is the absence of all feeling; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes enjoyable the mortality of life, not by adding to years an illimitable time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For in life there can be nothing to fear to him who has thoroughly apprehended that there is nothing to cause fear in what time we are not alive. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present causes only a groundless pain by the expectation thereof. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us; seeing that when we are, death is not yet, and when death comes, then we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or the dead; for it is not found with the living, and the dead exist no longer."

Of this Epicurean ideal we could not have a better picture than that which Horace gives in the Seventh Satire of the Second Book: "Who, then, is free? He who is wise, over himself true lord, unterrified by want and death and bonds; who can his passion stem, and glory scorn; in himself complete, like a sphere, perfectly

1 Letter of Epicurus, loc. cit.

(2) The standpoint of ancient Hedonism was that of the individual, the standpoint of modern is that of society or mankind in general, or even, as with Mill, of the entire sentient creation. While ancient Hedonism was egoistic, the modern is altruistic or universalistic. 'The greatest happiness of the greatest number' has taken the place of the greatest happiness of the individual; the scope of the end has been extended beyond the conception of its ancient advocates. The wise man' of the Epicurean school was wise for his own interests; his chief virtues were self-sufficiency and self-dependence. It is true that the Epicurean society was held together by the practice, on a fine scale, of the virtue of friendship, and that its members lived, in many respects, a common life; but this feature of their practice had no counterpart in their ethical theory. The modern Hedonist, realising this defect, and the necessity of differentiating his expanded theory of the end from the narrow conception of the elder school, has invented a new name to express this difference-namely, 'Utilitarianism.' The new conception has been only gradually reached, however; there is an interesting bridge between the old egoistic form of Hedonism and the new altruistic or utilitarian version of it, in the philosophy of Paley. To this 'lawyer-like mind' it seemed that we ought to seek "the happiness of mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness." The happiness of mankind, he holds, is the subject' or content of morality, but 'everlasting happiness'—our own, of course the 'motive.' The end, therefore, is our own individual happiness, and the happiness of others is to be sought merely as a means to that end. Such a theory is, it is obvious, thoroughly egoistic; it is only an improved version of the egoism of Hobbes, which formed the starting-point of modern ethical reflection. It is to Hume, Bentham, and Mill that we owe the substitution of the general happiness for that of the individual, as

-is

the end of life. According to each of these writers the true standpoint is that of society, not that of the individual: from the social standpoint alone can we estimate aright the claims either of our own happiness or of the happiness of others. Mill's statement is the most adequate on this important point.

"The utilitarian standard," he says, is "not the agent's own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether." The end, thus conceived, yields the true principle of the distribution of happiness. "As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality." Bentham had already enunciated this principle in the formula: "Each to count for one, and no one for more than one." But a new question is thus raised for the Hedonist-namely, how to reconcile the happiness of all with the happiness of each, or altruism with egoism. "Why am I bound to promote the general happiness? If my own happiness lies in something else, why may I not give that the preference?" Mill answers that there are two kinds of sanction for altruistic conduct, external and internal. Both had been recognised by his predecessors. Bentham mentions four sanctions, all external-viz., the physical, the political, the moral or popular, and the religious. All four are forces brought to bear upon the individual from without; and their common object is to produce an identity, or at least a community, of interest between the individual and society, in such wise that he shall find his account' in living conformably to the claims of the general happiness. But such external sanctions, alone, would provide only a secondary and indirect vindication for altruistic conduct. The individual whose life was governed by such con

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round, so that no external object can rest on the polished surface; against such a one fortune's assault is broken." It is an ideal of rational self-control, of deliverance from the storms of passion through the peace-speaking voice of reason. The state of sensibility is still the ethical end and criterion; but all the attention is directed to the means by which that end may be compassed, and the means are not sentient but rational. Nay, the end itself, as we have just seen, is rather a state of indifference, of neutral feeling, of insensibility, than a positive state of feeling at all.

3. (b) Modern Hedonism differs widely from ancient, British from Greek. If we take Mill as the representative of the modern doctrine, perhaps the differences may be said to resolve themselves, in the last analysis, into three.

(1) Ancient Hedonism, whether of the Cyrenaic or of the Epicurean type, was apt to be pessimistic; modern Hedonism is, on the whole, optimistic.1 While the Greek moralists found themselves forced to conceive the end rather as escape from pain than as positive pleasure, their successors in England (as well as recently in Germany) have no hesitation in returning to the original Cyrenaic conception of the end as real enjoyment, as not merely the absence of pain, but the presence of pleasure. Mill, it is true, in a significant admission, made almost incidentally, in the course of his main argument, seems on the point of striking once more the old pessimistic note. "Though it is only in a very imperfect state of the world's arrangements that any one can best serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet, so long as the world is in that imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue to be found in man. I will add, that in this condition of the world, paradoxical as the assertion may be,

1 The pessimistic tendency has of late, to a certain extent, reasserted itself.