They think it is an evidence of true wisdom for a man to pursue his own
advantages, as far as the laws allow it. They account it piety to prefer
the public good to one's private concerns; but they think it unjust for
a man to seek for pleasure, by snatching another man's pleasures from
him. And on the contrary, they think it a sign of a gentle and good
soul, for a man to dispense with his own advantage for the good of
others; and that by this means a good man finds as much pleasure one
way, as he parts with another; for as he may expect the like from others
when he may come to need it, so if that should fail him, yet the sense
of a good action, and the reflections that he makes on the love and
gratitude of those whom he has so obliged, gives the mind more pleasure
than the body could have found in that from which it had restrained
itself. They are also persuaded that God will make up the loss of those
small pleasures, with a vast and endless joy, of which religion easily
convinces a good soul.
Thus upon an inquiry into the whole matter, they reckon that all our
actions, and even all our virtues, terminate in pleasure, as in our
chief end and greatest happiness; and they call every motion or state,
either of body or mind, in which Nature teaches us to delight, a
pleasure. Thus they cautiously limit pleasure only to those appetites to
which Nature leads us; for they say that Nature leads us only to those
delights to which reason as well as sense carries us, and by which we
neither injure any other person, nor lose the possession of greater
pleasures, and of such as draw no troubles after them; but they look
upon those delights which men by a foolish, though common, mistake call
pleasure, as if they could change as easily the nature of things as the
use of words; as things that greatly obstruct their real happiness,
instead of advancing it, because they so entirely possess the minds of
those that are once captivated by them with a false notion of pleasure,
that there is no room left for pleasures of a truer or purer kind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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