three: (1) Different notions of happiness and the
means of promoting it, whereby much that is peculiar in national
customs, &c., is explained, without reflecting upon the moral sense.
(2) The larger or more confined field on which men consider the
tendencies of their actions--sect, party, country, &c. (3) Different
opinions about the divine commands, which are allowed to over-ride the
moral sense. The moral sense does not imply innate complex ideas of the
several actions and their tendencies, which must be discovered by
observation and reasoning; it is concerned only about inward affections
and dispositions, of which the effects may be very various. In closing
this part of his subject, he considers that all that is needed for the
formation of morals, has been given, because from the moral faculty and
benevolent affection all the special laws of nature can be deduced. But
because the moral faculty and benevolence have difficulty in making way
against the selfish principles so early rooted in man, it is needful to
strengthen these foundations of morality by the consideration of the
nature of the highest happiness.

With Chapter VI. accordingly he enters on the discussion of Happiness,
forming the second half of his first book. The supreme happiness of any
being is the full enjoyment of all the gratifications its nature
desires or is capable of; but, in case of their being inconsistent, the
constant gratification of the higher, intenser, and more durable
pleasures is to be preferred.

In Chapter VII., he therefore directly compares the various kinds of
enjoyment and misery, in order to know what of the first must be
surrendered, and what of the second endured, in aiming at highest
attainable happiness. Pleasures the same in kind are preferable,
according as they are more intense and enduring; of a different kind,
as they are more enduring and dignified, a fact decided at once by our
immediate sense of dignity or worth. In the great diversity of tastes
regarding pleasures, he supposes the ultimate decision as to the value
of pleasures to rest with the possessors of finer perceptive powers,
but adds, that good men are the best judges, because possessed of
fuller experience than the vicious, whose tastes, senses, and appetites
have lost their natural vigour through one-sided indulgence. He then
goes through the various pleasures, depreciating the pleasures of the
palate on the positive side, and sexual pleasure as transitor