"But I feel obliged to put in a word for the pig and the fool. The difficulty is greater than Mill imagines. Man, it is true, knows all the wants of the pig, and it would not be difficult for a Socrates to comprehend those of the fool. But man does not have the wants of the pig, nor Socrates those of the fool, as his _sole and only dominant_ wants. And yet this is the very circumstance that determines the matter. Man cannot transform himself into a pig without ceasing to be a man, and a Socrates will hardly be able so to identify himself with a fool as to lose completely his Socratic wants. If, now, the pig can attain the _complete_ satisfaction of all _his_ wants, is not his happiness greater than that of man whose desires and whose longings are never wholly satisfied? And the fool, who does not nourish many thoughts and makes no great demands upon life, is he not happier than Socrates who spends his whole life in striving to know himself and to stimulate others, only finally to declare that death is really preferable to life?"
Professor Höffding's solution of the difficulty is summed up in the following paragraph:
"Welfare is an illusion if we understand by it a passive condition of things, created once for all. It must consist in _action_, work, development. Rest can only mean a termination for the time being, the attainment of a new level, upon which it is possible for a new course of development to proceed."
Thus it appears that Professor Höffding decides in favor of the second principle. The evolution of the life-totality is considered higher than a continuous state of pleasurable feeling. Nevertheless Professor Höffding adds:
"On that account, however, we are not obliged to retract our first definition of welfare as that of a continuous state of pleasurable feeling. That which must be rejected is only the notion of a passive state."
Truly, as Professor Höffding says, "the difficulty is greater than Mr. Mill imagined." The difficulty is great enough to undermine the whole basis upon which welfare is defined as "a state of continuous pleasurable feeling." If, as Professor Höffding declares, welfare is to be interpreted as activity, work, development; if this kind of active welfare is the greatest good, whatever admixture of pain and whatever absence of pleasurable feeling it may have; if the greatest amount of a state of continuous pleasurable feeling is not welfare in an ethical sense, what becomes of the utilitarian definition of welfare as pleasurable feeling? If, however, welfare is "the state of a continuous pleasurable feeling," how can we declare that the life of a pessimistic philosopher is preferable to that of a joyful fool?
