affections have been contracted by over-study continued regardless
of discomfort and the cravings for fresh air and exercise.[B] Even
without accumulating special examples, the truth is forced on us by the
visible traits of classes. The careworn man of business too long at
his office, the cadaverous barrister pouring half the night over his
briefs, the feeble factory hands and unhealthy seamstresses passing
long hours in bad air, the anæmic, flat-chested school-girls, bending
over many lessons and forbidden boisterous play, no less than Sheffield
grinders who die of suffocating dust, and peasants crippled with
rheumatism due to exposure, show us the wide spread miseries caused
by persevering in actions repugnant to the sensations and neglecting
actions which the sensations prompt. Nay, the evidence is still more
extensive and conspicuous. What are the puny malformed children, seen
in poverty-stricken districts, but children whose appetites for food
and desires for warmth have not been adequately satisfied? What are
populations stinted in growth and prematurely aged, such as parts of
France show us, but populations injured by work in excess and food in
defect: the one implying positive pain, the other negative pain? What
is the implication of that greater mortality which occurs among people
who are weakened by privations, unless it is that bodily miseries
conduce to fatal illnesses? Or once more, what must we infer from
the frightful amount of disease and death suffered by armies in the
field, fed on scanty and bad provisions, lying on damp ground, exposed
to extremes of heat and cold, inadequately sheltered from rain, and
subject to exhausting efforts; unless it be the terrible mischiefs
caused by continuously subjecting the body to treatment which the
feelings protest against?
It matters not to the argument whether the actions entailing such
effects are voluntary or involuntary. It matters not from the
biological point of view whether the motives prompting them are high or
low. The vital functions accept no apologies on the ground that neglect
of them was unavoidable, or that the reason for neglect was noble. The
direct and indirect sufferings caused by non-conformity to the laws
of life are the same whatever induces the non-conformity; and cannot
be omitted in any rational estimate of conduct. If the purpose of
ethical inquiry is to establish rules of right living; and if the rules
of right living are those of which the total results, individual and
general, direct and indirect, are most conducive to human happiness;
then it is absurd to ignore the immediate results and recognize only
the remote results.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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