Especially is this the case with the
pleasures and pains attendant on the exercise of the moral feelings. A
man who is tormented with the recollection of having committed a great
crime will, as the phrase goes, 'take pleasure in nothing;' while,
similarly, a man who is enjoying the retrospect of having done his duty,
in some important crisis, will care little for obloquy or even for the
infliction of physical suffering. Making this admission, then, as well
as recognising the fact that our pleasures differ in quality as well as
in volume, so that the pleasures of the higher part of our nature, the
religious, the intellectual, the moral, the aesthetic, the sympathetic
nature, affect us with a different kind of enjoyment from the sensual
pleasures, or those which are derived from them, we may rightly regard
the tendency to produce a balance of pleasure over pain as the test of
the goodness of an action, and the effort and intention to perform acts
having this tendency as the test of the morality of the agent. But when
we enunciate the production of pleasure as our aim, or the balance of
pleasure-producing over pain-producing results as the test of right
action, we are not always understood to have admitted these
explanations, and, consequently, there is always a danger of our being
supposed to degrade morality by identifying it with the gratification,
in ourselves and others, of the coarser and more material impulses of
our nature.
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