marks that, supposing happiness impossible, the
prevention of unhappiness might still be an object, which is a mode of
Utility. But the alleged impossibility of happiness is either a verbal
quibble or an exaggeration. No one contends for a life of sustained
rapture; occasional moments of such, in an existence of few and
transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a predominance of
the active over the passive, and moderate expectations on the whole,
constitute a life worthy to be called happiness. Numbers of mankind
have been satisfied with much less. There are two great factors of
enjoyment--tranquillity and excitement. With the one, little pleasure
will suffice; with the other, considerable pain can be endured. It does
not appear impossible to secure both in alternation. The principal
defect in persons of fortunate lot is to care for nobody but
themselves; this curtails the excitements of life, and makes everything
dwindle as the end approaches. Another circumstance rendering life
unsatisfactory is the want of mental cultivation, by which men are
deprived of the inexhaustible pleasures of knowledge, not merely in the
shape of science, but as practice and fine art. It is not at all
difficult to indicate sources of happiness; the main stress of the
problem lies in the contest with the positive evils of life, the great
sources of physical and of mental suffering--indigence, disease, and
the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature loss of objects of
affection. Poverty and Disease may be contracted in dimensions; and
even vicissitudes of fortune are not wholly beyond control.

It is unquestionably possible to do without happiness. This is the lot
of the greater part of mankind, and is often voluntarily chosen by the
hero or the martyr. But self-sacrifice is not its own end; it must be
made to earn for others immunity from sacrifice. It must be a very
imperfect state of the world's arrangements that requires any one to
serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of their own;
yet undoubtedly while the world is in that imperfect state, the
readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue that can be
found in man. Nay, farther, the conscious ability to do without
happiness, in such a condition of the world, is the best prospect of
realizing such happiness as is attainable. Meanwhile, self-devotion
belongs as much to the Utilitarian as to the Stoic or the
Transcendentalist; with the reservation that a