It pleased our Creator, when he endowed us with appetites and
functions by which to sustain the economy of life, at the same time to
annex to their exercise a sense of pleasure; hence our daily food, and
the daily alternation of repose and action, are no less grateful than
imperative. That life may be sustained, and most of its functions
performed, without any coincident enjoyment, is certainly possible.
Our food may be distasteful, action painful, and rest unrefreshing;
and yet we may eat, and exercise, and sleep, nay, live thus for years.
But this is not our natural condition, and we call it disease. Were
man a mere animal, the very act of living, in his natural or healthy
state, would be to him a continuous enjoyment. But he is also a moral
and an intellectual being; and, in like manner, is the healthful
condition of these, the nobler parts of his nature, attended with
something more than a consciousness of the mere process of existence.
To the exercise of his intellectual faculties and moral attributes the
same benevolent law has superadded a sense of pleasure,--of a kind,
too, in the same degree transcending the highest bodily sensation, as
must that which is immortal transcend the perishable. It is not for us
to ask why it is so; much less, because it squares not with the
poor notion of material usefulness, to call in question a fact that
announces a nature to which the senses are but passing ministers. Let
us rather receive this ennobling law, at least without misgiving, lest
in our sensuous wisdom we exchange an enduring gift for a transient
gratification.

Of the peculiar fruits of this law, which we shall here distinguish by
the general term _mental pleasures_, it is our purpose to treat
in the present discourse.

It is with no assumed diffidence that we venture on this subject; for,