Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural LawRickaby, Joseph
Philosophy
Moral Philosophy: Ethics, Deontology and Natural Law
Rickaby, Joseph
Ethics
1. Delight like desire may be either physical or psychical. All that
has been said above of desire under this division applies also to
delight, which is the realization of desire. This division does not
altogether fall in with that into _sensual_ delights and
_intellectual_ delights. A professional wine-taster could hardly be
said to find intellectual delight in a bottle of good Champagne, real
_Veuve-Clicquot_: yet certainly his is a psychical delight, no mere
unsophisticated gratification of appetite. Sensual delights then are
those delights which are founded on the gratification of appetite,
whether simple--in which case the delight is physical--or studied and
fancy-wrought appetite, the gratification of which is psychical
delight. Intellectual delights on the other hand are those that come
of the exercise of intellect, not unsupported by imagination, but
where appetite enters not at all, or only as a remote adjunct, albeit
the delight may turn upon some sight or sound, as of music, or of a
fine range of hills. Or the object may be a thing of intellect, pure
and removed from sense as far as an object of human contemplation can
be, for instance, the first elements of matter, freewill, the
immensity of God. The study of such objects yields a purer
intellectual delight than that of the preceding. But this is a high
ground and a keen upper air, where few can tread and breathe.
2. A man has more complacency in himself upon attaining to some
intellectual delight than upon a sensual satisfaction: he is prouder
to have solved a problem than to have enjoyed his dinner. Also, he
would rather forego the capacity of sensual enjoyment than that of
intellectual pleasure; rather lose his sense of taste than his science
or his scholarship, if he has any notable amount of either. Again, put
sensual delight in one scale, and in the other the intellectual
delight of honour, no worthy specimen of a man will purchase the
pleasure at the price of honour. The disgrace attaching to certain
modes of enjoyment is sufficient to make men shun them, very pleasant
though they be to sense. Again, sensual delight is a passing thing,
waxing and waning: but intellectual delight is steady, grasped and
held firmly as a whole. But sensual delight comes more welcome of the
two in this that it removes a pre-existing uneasiness, as hunger,
weariness, nervous prostration, thus doing a medicinal office: whereas
no such office attaches in the essential nature of things to
intellectual delight, as that does not presuppose any uneasiness; and
though it may remove uneasiness, the removal is difficult, because the
uneasiness itself is an obstacle to the intellectual effort that must
be made to derive any intellectual delight. Sensual enjoyment is the
cheaper physician, and ailing mortals mostly resort to that door.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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