to subdue him: which, once felt, frees him from excess of anxiety
concerning the evils of life, and enables him, like many a Stoic in the
worst times of the Roman Empire, to cultivate in tranquillity the
sources of satisfaction accessible to him, without concerning himself
about the uncertainty of their duration, any more than about their
inevitable end.

Meanwhile, let utilitarians never cease to claim the morality of
self-devotion as a possession which belongs by as good a right to them,
as either to the Stoic or to the Transcendentalist. The utilitarian
morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their
own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that
the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or
tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.
The only self-renunciation which it applauds, is devotion to the
happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others; either of
mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits imposed by the
collective interests of mankind.

I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have
the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the
utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own
happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and
that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial
as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus
of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To
do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself,
constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As the means of
making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin, first,
that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as