things. The scorn of content with the things with which we ought not to be contented possesses us. The very words which pious souls have framed seem blasphemous to us in our altered mood. The present violent denunciation of the Church voices itself in some such terms. The Church's condemnation of itself runs to the same effect. To have pointed men to heaven when it should have lent a hand to make the earth a little less like hell; to have harped upon the soul when what was needed was to feed and clothe the body; to have asked men to be patient when sick, instead of taking up into our holy place of religion the intent to make them well-these seem the last betrayals of religion by supposedly religious men. And so it has come to pass that there is not a problem which modern society presents which is not being set forth in the light of an object of religious purpose and religious apprehension. Admirable is the recognition that it is within the scope of our Christianity to take up every fight that needs to be fought, to bear every burden that is to be borne, to hold back nothing until the full idealization of man's life, as we believe that God designed it, shall have been secured.

But what we wish to bring out is that this view is no more adequate when it stands alone than is that other view when it stands alone. The excesses and extravagancies upon the one side are as disastrous as are the exaggerations on the other. A religion which is all of this world must in the end be but a parody of religion, so surely as must a religion which is all of the soul and of the other world. It is this which we feel when the smallness, the fragmentary nature, the outward and passing quality of that which thus for some takes up into itself the whole energy of religion, sometimes appals us.

For this would seem to be the true thing here to say: A single object of ethical, social, economic endeavor may be quite legitimate. It is the great sign of the times that we seek to spread thus the apprehension of the sacred and eternal over the things which have been left altogether on one side by the religious, or dismissed as secular. A single object of social, ethical, or economic endeavor may be upon occasion, above all others, the proper object for the Christian enthusiasm to set before itself. But so surely as that single object, or that single kind of object, is torn from its relation to the whole of life, is made the limit of

the horizon, the absolute content of life and goal of our endeavor, it loses all its light as a divine ideal, its glory as an object upon which true religion may expend itself. Religion cannot be thus circumscribed, shut in, cut off. The moment you limit it in this way, it ceases to be religion. It was at this point that the men of the elder view of religion, as belonging solely to the inner life and the other world, made their mistake. We are in danger of making precisely the same mistake, only the other way about. It may be true that I, as a Christian man, may be under obligation to pour out my life for the bettering of the economic condition of the poor. But if I am so carried away by my sympathy as to think, or to make those for whom I labor think, that that better economic condition of the poor is all, or even a large part, of what is meant by the Kingdom of God, then we are in danger of forgetting what religion is. Then the pursuit even of a great end becomes narrowing, hardening, lowering; the following of it does not lift us up in the old way, but drags us and all men down. The thing becomes a mere fad and fanaticism, and even the successful achievement of it would leave us only more sodden than we were before. A mind sobered by reflection upon the experience of humanity cannot but feel the infinite pathos of the assumption so widely current among us that where reformsthese or those, any or all-have been accomplished, all that we mean by the Kingdom of God will have come.

If ever an age should have been cured of the hallucination that wealth or the being absolved from toil brings blessedness, it should be this age of ours. Who is the man whom wealth blesses? Surely only the man who has something for which he cares more than he does for wealth; something which he would not have sacrificed to gain wealth; something for which he uses wealth now that it is gained. Caring most of all for that, he could be blessed even should he lose his wealth. Who is the man whom health blesses? Surely only that man who, having health, uses it as a priceless endowment of the power for work. On any other basis, the oxen beat us. But such a man as this of whom I speak would sacrifice health and even life itself tomorrow for a worthy end. Such a man, if he lost health, would then be exalted in character and hallowed and glorified through pain. Emerson said "If a man will have too much, what goes

into his bag comes out of his soul." How much is too much? You can never answer that question in dollars. You have to know the man. A little is too much if one sets his soul upon it. In fact, even the dollars which a man never got have been too much for the man whose soul was shriveled through the passion for the getting them. At the bottom of our hearts we all admit that for anything concerning the constitution of the universe which we yet know, it will draw much nearer to being a Godforsaken world than it now is when all the courage, patience, tenderness, which are born of sorrow, and all the power and majesty of manhood which come by conflict and toil, are gone out of it and the sodden millennium of the flesh is come. Never fear! the millennium of the flesh thus isolated from the kingdom of the mind and spirit will never come. In every effort thus to bring it in, humanity has overreached itself. It will never come, the ideal condition of the outward lot and life, save by the same steps and in the same measure that the millennium of the mind. and spirit come as well. When these come together, then the outward condition will be a benediction and not a curse.

For there is another thing which in this connection we must never forget. Into the things which we just now propose to storm by violence, or steal by sentimentality, the mental toil— most likely of whole generations-to discover principles and learn how to apply them must yet go. Nothing whatsoever can be counted gained here until it is intellectually valid. The mind of man, intent ofttimes upon the most painful problems, yet as problems of pure science and as if there were no pain, has worked out all the previous questions in the issue of which we, in modern civilization, stand in any way secure. One marvels, therefore, how in this day of universal praise of education, it is as if, midway of the process of discovery of the intellectual basis of the changes which our eager hearts forecast, the generation had suddenly lost patience. It is as if men could not wait for science, but must steal that good sign and set it up upon their own imaginings, must disregard the remonstrances of those who have made it their life business to try to find out what is the underlying truth in these relations. They must fall to abusing slow-footed, plodding intellect in the same breath with which they have decried the ancient faith. In the long period of difficult adjustment

which we have been passing through, the disagreement between the sciences and faith has sometimes been assumed to be a fundamental one. But to have the whole intellectual endeavor of a generation flouted because it also is not able to march fast enough, that is a picturesque experience. We advocates of religion, so long down-trodden, are touched in our sense of humor to find our old opponents, the scientific people, now somewhat in the same case. It looks as if we were going to be pungently reminded, from this side as well, of the wholeness of man's life, of the integrity of scientific processes, of the inviolable nature of evidence, of the impossibility of any real advance of man into a realm to which the sober, patient study of the facts and cautious induction from the facts, the brave and often costly experiment in the application of the facts, have not prepared the way.

Nothing that is not intellectually sound can possibly stand. Nothing which is not economically right, socially just and advantageous for all concerned, can in the long run by any possibility prevail. And concerning much that with passionate zeal and hot heart we do desire for others, or demand for ourselves, just that it is which has got to be worked out. The question is whether they are sound. You say that the Church must show sympathy. By all means! but sympathy is not the only quality requisite to leadership. Upon occasion it means more to leadership to be right than even to be sympathetic. We do not think so meanly of our fellows as to believe that any great majority of them want coddling. They do not know what is right. We do not any of us know altogether what is right. But the instant we go within ourselves we know that many things which are now being held out to people in the name of religion and to impress upon them the notion that we are sympathetic are not right and not wise. They are not intellectually sound, and they are not morally for the best. They refer too much, if not wholly, to rights, present advantages, outward gains, ease, and escape from toils and pains. They have not that note which every man knows to be true, that note which, believe me, this age and land of ours is waiting to hear, and knows that it ought to hear of all places on earth in the church of Christ; and which, when it hears, it obeys.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY,

May 7, 1910.

XXII

THE THEORY OF PLEASURE

HARRY NORMAN GARDINER

THE word "pleasure" is ambiguous. We call a man's "pleasures" the things he takes pleasure in, usually his amusements. Again, "pleasure" is used to denote the whole of a concrete pleasurable experience. In psychology the term has a more restricted meaning. A distinction is drawn between the other factors of the experience and the feeling of its pleasantness. "Pleasure" then denotes this feeling, an aspect, moment or element of the pleasant experience. The distinction is in certain respects important. It is a question, for example, in the discussion of hedonistic theories of ethics, whether pleasures differ in quality, and so afford a ground of preference, or only in degree. Clearly if the question relates to concrete pleasures, the answer is plain: the pleasures differ in quality so far as there is any qualitative difference in their constituents, and this difference may be a valid ground of preference. But if the question relates to the mere pleasantness felt in the different experiences, abstraction being made of the other elements of the content, the answer is not so easy, for mere pleasantness is unanalysable and different instances of it are difficult to compare; hence the conflict of opinion on the subject among trained observers. Presumably a decision can be reached, if at all, only from considerations that are indirect. Again, it is sometimes asserted that pleasure is always the object of desire. But this, if mere pleasantness is meant, is evidently false, for it is only in the rarest cases that that is thought of as an object at all. On the other hand, if concrete pleasurable experience is meant, the assertion becomes almost a truism, for we certainly desire an experience fulfilling the desire and so far pleasant, though not necessarily so in other respects.