1.Are we to make True Happiness one and the same thing with Welfare or Prosperity and therefore within the reach of the other living beings as well as ourselves?
There is certainly no reason to deny well-being to any of them as long as their lot allows them to flourish unhindered after their kind.
Whether we make Welfare consist in pleasant conditions of life, or in the accomplishment of some appropriate task, by either account it may fall to them as to us.For certainly they may at once be pleasantly placed and engaged about some function that lies in their nature: take for an instance such living beings as have the gift of music; finding themselves well-off in other ways, they sing, too, as their nature is, and so their day is pleasant to them.
And if, even, we set Happiness in some ultimate Term pursued by inborn tendency, then on this head, too, we must allow it to animals from the moment of their attaining this Ultimate: the nature in them comes to a halt, having fulfilled its vital course from a beginning to an end.
It may be a distasteful notion, this bringing-down of happiness so low as to the animal world- making it over, as then we must, even to the vilest of them and not withholding it even from the plants, living they too and having a life unfolding to a Term.
But, to begin with, it is surely unsound to deny that good of life to animals only because they do not appear to man to be of great account.And as for plants, we need not necessarily allow to them what we accord to the other forms of life, since they have no feeling.It is true people might be found to declare prosperity possible to the very plants: they have life, and life may bring good or evil; the plants may thrive or wither, bear or be barren.
No: if Pleasure be the Term, if here be the good of life, it is impossible to deny the good of life to any order of living things;if the Term be inner-peace, equally impossible; impossible, too, if the good of life be to live in accordance with the purpose of nature.
2.Those that deny the happy life to the plants on the ground that they lack sensation are really denying it to all living things.
By sensation can be meant only perception of state, and the state of well-being must be Good in itself quite apart from the perception: to be a part of the natural plan is good whether knowingly or without knowledge: there is good in the appropriate state even though there be no recognition of its fitness or desirable quality-for it must be in itself desirable.
This Good exists, then; is present: that in which it is present has well-being without more ado: what need then to ask for sensation into the bargain?
Perhaps, however, the theory is that the good of any state consists not in the condition itself but in the knowledge and perception of it.
But at this rate the Good is nothing but the mere sensation, the bare activity of the sentient life.And so it will be possessed by all that feel, no matter what.Perhaps it will be said that two constituents are needed to make up the Good, that there must be both feeling and a given state felt: but how can it be maintained that the bringing together of two neutrals can produce the Good?
They will explain, possibly, that the state must be a state of Good and that such a condition constitutes well-being on the discernment of that present good; but then they invite the question whether the well-being comes by discerning the presence of the Good that is there, or whether there must further be the double recognition that the state is agreeable and that the agreeable state constitutes the Good.
If well-being demands this recognition, it depends no longer upon sensation but upon another, a higher faculty; and well-being is vested not in a faculty receptive of pleasure but in one competent to discern that pleasure is the Good.
Then the cause of the well-being is no longer pleasure but the faculty competent to pronounce as to pleasure's value.Now a judging entity is nobler than one that merely accepts a state: it is a principle of Reason or of Intellection: pleasure is a state: the reasonless can never be closer to the Good than reason is.How can reason abdicate and declare nearer to good than itself something lying in a contrary order?
No: those denying the good of life to the vegetable world, and those that make it consist in some precise quality of sensation, are in reality seeking a loftier well-being than they are aware of, and setting their highest in a more luminous phase of life.
Perhaps, then, those are in the right who found happiness not on the bare living or even on sensitive life but on the life of Reason?
But they must tell us it should be thus restricted and why precisely they make Reason an essential to the happiness in a living being:
"When you insist on Reason, is it because Reason is resourceful, swift to discern and compass the primal needs of nature; or would you demand it, even though it were powerless in that domain?"If you call it in as a provider, then the reasonless, equally with the reasoning, may possess happiness after their kind, as long as, without any thought of theirs, nature supplies their wants: Reason becomes a servant; there is no longer any worth in it for itself and no worth in that consummation of reason which, we hold, is virtue.
If you say that reason is to be cherished for its own sake and not as supplying these human needs, you must tell us what other services it renders, what is its proper nature and what makes it the perfect thing it is.
For, on this admission, its perfection cannot reside in any such planning and providing: its perfection will be something quite different, something of quite another class: Reason cannot be itself one of those first needs of nature; it cannot even be a cause of those first needs of nature or at all belong to that order: it must be nobler than any and all of such things: otherwise it is not easy to see how we can be asked to rate it so highly.