r faculty is cognizance taken of them?

Questions about ends are, in other words, questions what things are
desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and
the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only
desirable as means to that end. What ought to be required of this
doctrine--what conditions is it requisite that the doctrine should
fulfil--to make good its claim to be believed?

The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that
people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that
people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like
manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that
anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end
which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory
and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince
any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general
happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes
it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a
fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all
which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each
person's happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness,
therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons. Happiness has made
out its title as _one_ of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of
the criteria of morality.

But it has not, by this alone, proved itself to be the sole criterion.
To do that, it would seem, by the same rule, necessary to show, not only
that people desire happiness, but that they never desire anything else.
Now it is palpable that they do desire things which, in common language,
are decidedly distinguished from happiness. They desire, for example,
virtue, and the absence of vice, no less really than pleasure and the
absence of pain. The desire of virtue is not as universal, but it is as
authentic a fact, as the desire of happiness. And hence the opponents of
the utilitarian standard deem that they have a right to infer that there
are other ends of human action besides happiness, and that happiness is
not the standard of approbation and disapprobation.

But does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or
maintain that virtue is not a thing to be desired? The very reverse. It
maintains not only that virtue i