=The Moral Interest as Final Happiness.=--Consequently the true or final happiness of an individual, the happiness which is not at the mercy of circumstance and change of circumstance, lies not in objective achievement of results, but in the supremacy within character of an alert, sincere, and persistent interest in those habits and institutions which forward common ends among men. Mill insisted that quality of happiness was morally important, not quantity. Well, that quality which is most important is the peace and joy of mind that accompanies the abiding and equable maintenance of socialized interests as central springs of action. To one in whom these interests live (and they live to some extent in every individual not completely pathological) their exercise brings happiness because it fulfills his life. To those in whom it is the supreme interest it brings supreme or final happiness. It is not preferred because it is the greater happiness, but in being preferred as expressing the only kind of self which the agent fundamentally wishes himself to be, it constitutes a kind of happiness with which others cannot be compared. It is unique, final, invaluable.[155] =Identity of the Individual and General Happiness.=--No algebraic summing up of sympathetic pleasures, utilities of friendship, advantages of popularity and esteem, profits of economic exchange among equals, over against pains from legal penalties and disapproving public opinion, and lack of sympathetic support by others, can ever make it even approximately certain that an individual's own interest, in terms of quantity of pleasures and pains, is to regard the interest of others.[156] Such a demonstration, moreover, if possible, would not support but would weaken the moral life. It would reduce the manifestation of character to selecting greater rather than less amounts of homogeneous ends. It would degrade reflection and consideration to ingenuity in detecting where larger quantities of pleasures lie, and to skill in performing sums of addition and subtraction. Even if such a scheme could be demonstrated, every one except the most languid and phlegmatic of pleasure-seekers would reject a life built upon it. Not only the "good," but the more vigorous and hearty of the "bad," would scorn a life in which character, selfhood, had no significance, and where the experimental discovery and testing of destiny had no place. The identity of individual and general happiness is a _moral_ matter; it depends, that is, upon the reflective and intentional development of that type of character which identifies itself with common ends, and which is happy in these ends just because it has made them its own.