This principle, not new in itself, led to very new and important results when it was taken up not by a mere reasoner but by a man of the most various gifts and of the greatest energy. By “pleasure” or “satisfaction of desire” is usually meant something obvious, something passive, merely a supply of agreeable sensations to each of the five senses. In Goethe’s mouth the word takes quite a different meaning. He cannot conceive pleasure without energetic action, and the most necessary of all pleasures to him is that of imaginative creation. The desires, again, for which he claims satisfaction—what are they? Chief among them is the desire to enter into the secret of the universe, to recognize “what it is which holds the world together within.” Such desires as these might be satisfied, such pleasures enjoyed, without any very culpable self-indulgence. And existence would be satisfactory, or, as he calls it, harmonious, if it offered continually and habitually food for desire so understood, which is almost the same thing as capacity. But there are hindrances. The chief of these is the supposition of self denial. Of course every practical man knows that self-denial of a certain kind must be constantly practised in life. The small object must be foregone for the sake of the greater, the immediate pleasure for the sake of the remote, nay, the personal pleasure for the sake of the pleasure which is generous and sympathetic. But the timid superstition which sets up self-denial, divorced from all rational ends, as a thing good and right in itself, which makes us afraid of enjoyment as such, this is the chief hindrance, and against this Goethe launches his chief work “Faust.” There is another hindrance, less obvious and needing to be dealt with in another way, which Goethe therefore attacks usually in prose rather than in poetry.