eponderance of suffering; and what arrests this desire is not fear or
weakness but conscience in its most categorical and sacred guise. Who
would not be ashamed to acknowledge or to propose so inhuman an action?

By sad experience rooted impulses may be transformed or even
obliterated. And quite intelligibly: for the idea of pain is already the
sign and the beginning of a certain stoppage. To imagine failure is to
interpret ideally a felt inhibition. To prophesy a check would be
impossible but for an incipient movement already meeting an incipient
arrest. Intensified, this prophecy becomes its own fulfilment and
totally inhibits the opposed tendency. Therefore a mind that foresees
pain to be the ultimate result of action cannot continue unreservedly to
act, seeing that its foresight is the conscious transcript of a recoil
already occurring. Conversely, the mind that surrenders itself wholly to
any impulse must think that its execution would be delightful. A
perfectly wise and representative will, therefore, would aim only at
what, in its attainment, could continue to be aimed at and approved; and
this is another way of saying that its aim would secure the maximum of
satisfaction eventually possible.

[Sidenote: Necessary qualifications.]

In spite, however, of this involution of pain and pleasure in all
deliberate forecast and volition, pain and pleasure are not the ultimate
sources of value. A correct psychology and logic cannot allow that an
eventual and, in strictness, unpresentable feeling, can determine any
act or volition, but must insist that, on the contrary, all beliefs
about future experience, with all premonition of its emotional quality,
is based on actual impulse and feeling; so that the source of value is
nothing but the inner fountain of life and imagination, and the object
of pursuit nothing but the ideal object, counterpart of the present
demand. Abstract satisfaction is not pursued, but, if the will and the
environment are constant, satisfaction will necessarily be felt in
achieving the object desired. A rejection of hedonistic psychology,
therefore, by no means involves any opposition to eudaemonism in ethics.
Eudaemonism is another name for wisdom: there is no other _moral_
morality. Any system that, for some sinister reason, should absolve
itself from good-will toward all creatures, and make it somehow a duty
to secure their misery, would be clearly disloyal to reason, humanity,
and justice. Nor w