The conception of social well-being must be more or less
vague, because we are constantly filling it up by experience; it is not
a fixed, but a growing conception, and, though we may be certain of the
character and importance of many of the elements which have already been
detected in it by the experience of past generations, it seems
impossible to fix any limits to its development in the future history of
mankind. Man will constantly be discovering new wants, new and more
refined susceptibilities of his nature, and with them his conception of
human well-being must necessarily grow. But, though not a fixed or final
conception, the idea of social well-being is sufficiently definite, in
each generation, to act as a guide and incentive to conduct. It is the
star, gradually growing brighter and brighter, which lights our path,
and, any way, we know that, if it were not above us in the heavens, we
should be walking in the darkness.
It must be confessed that the test of social well-being is not always
easy of application. Even, when we know what the good of the community
consists in, it is not always easy to say what course of action will
promote it, or what course of action is likely to retard it. Society
arrives, in a comparatively early period of its development, at certain
broad rules of conduct, such as those which condemn murder, theft,
ingratitude to friends, disobedience to parents.
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