The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Studies and StrowingsBrinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Philosophy
The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Studies and Strowings
Brinton, Daniel G. (Daniel Garrison)
Happiness
All are wrong. The spirit of sound culture will recognize the whole
nature of man and the solidarity of all his parts, and will insist on
respecting that unity, if his true development is to be accomplished.
For this reason it will strive to render the pleasures of the senses
and emotions as intellectual as possible; and with not less
earnestness will aim to keep the pleasures of the intellect in touch
with the emotions and the senses. Its principle will be that the more
intimately the gratifications of sense are infused with emotion and
thought, the more they will be both purified and strengthened; and the
closer the web into which we can weave the austere joys of the reason
along with the emotions and the feelings, the more sympathetic,
wide-reaching, and ennobling will those joys become. As the ancient
mason mingled water from the sky with clay from the earth to make the
bricks wherewith to build the temple, so the permanent structure of
human progress can be erected only by combining in due proportion the
extremes of man’s delights.
A real though mysterious bond unites sense with that which is above
and beyond sense. Toward this Unknown it is ever striving, though
blindly and unconsciously. In lower forms of life this has led to that
marvelous series of transformations which, at last, have reached their
culmination in man. In him the struggle no longer expends itself in
physical changes, but frames the ideals which float before his mind,
constantly spurring him to attempt the impossible. Rest assured that
the analogy which holds good throughout all organic nature fails not
in him, its most perfect production. Somehow, by unknown ways and
under the guidance of unseen laws, his unwearying effort to discover
the invisible in the visible, the permanent in the transient, the
ideal in the real, will infallibly lead him in triumph to the final
goal of all Life. Whenever, without ulterior aim and for its own sake,
we give ourselves up to the admiration of some grand scene in nature
or masterful production of human art, we feel and recognize how near
to us, how much a part of us, is that invisible and ideal world in
which are set up the goals of man’s noblest aspirations. To unite
these opposites, to illuminate the pleasures of sense with the light
of the ideal, and, on the other hand, to capture its evanescent rays
by entangling them in material enjoyments, is the final precept of the
Art of Happiness.
* * * * *
Anthropology, the Science of Man, is the point of convergence of all
the other sciences; and the one aim of the Science of Man is the
Happiness of man; thus the Pursuit of Happiness is the end of all
pursuits. Pope displayed the inspiration of the poet when he devoted
the final epistle of the Essay on Man to a discussion of,
“Happiness, our being’s end and aim.”
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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