“They think it is an evidence of true wisdom for a man to pursue his
own advantage 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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