The foregoing considerations must, I think, seriously reduce our confidence in what I have called the Empirical-reflective method of Egoistic Hedonism. I do not conclude that we should reject it altogether: I am conscious that, in spite of all the difficulties that I have urged, I continue to make comparisons between pleasures and pains with practical reliance on their results. But I conclude that it would be at least highly desirable, with a view to the systematic direction of conduct, to control and supplement the results of such comparisons by the assistance of some other method: if we can find any on which we see reason to rely.
[108] See chap. v. of this Book, chap. xiv. of Book iii., and the concluding chapter of the treatise.
[109] See Green’s Introduction to vol. ii. of Hume’s _Treatise on Human Nature_, § 7. The statement is substantially repeated in the same writer’s _Prolegomena to Ethics_.
[111] _E.g._ Butler, _Sermon_ xi. says, “Every man hath a desire for his own happiness ... the object [desired] is our own happiness, enjoyment, satisfaction.”
[115] This Green in several passages seems expressly to admit _e.g._ (§ 332) he says that certain measures “needed in order to supply conditions favourable to good character, tend also to make life more pleasant on the whole”: and, elsewhere, that “it is easy to show that an overbalance of pain would result to those capable of being affected by it” from the neglect of certain duties.
[118] I cannot state this positively, because--as I have said--Green expressly distinguishes self-satisfaction from pleasure, and does not expressly affirm that its absence is attended by pain.
[119] Sully, _Pessimism_, chap. xi. p. 282.
§ 1. Before we examine those methods of seeking one’s own happiness which are more remote from the empirical, it will be well to consider how far we may reasonably avoid the difficulties and uncertainties of the method of reflective comparison, by relying on the current opinions and accepted estimates of the value of different objects commonly sought as sources of pleasure.
It certainly seems more natural to men, at least in the main plan and ordering of their lives, to seek and consciously estimate the objective conditions and sources of happiness, rather than happiness itself; and it may plausibly be said that by relying on such estimates of objects we avoid the difficulties that beset the introspective method of comparing feelings: and that the common opinions as to the value of different sources of pleasure express the net result of the combined experience of mankind from generation to generation: in which the divergences due to the limitations of each individual’s experience, and to the differently tinged moods in which different estimates have been taken, have balanced and neutralised each other and so disappeared.