semi-oriental untouched by the least sense of responsibility, or even on
the lips of humanists in the eighteenth century, who, however sordid their
lives may sometimes have been, could still move in imagination to the
music of Mozart, in the landscape of Watteau or of Fragonard. But in the
land and age of Dickens the moral ideal was not so much pleasure as
kindness: this tenderer word not only expresses better the motive at work,
but it points to the distressing presence of misery in the world, to make
natural kindness laborious and earnest, and turn it into a legislative
system.

Bradley's hostility to pleasure was not fanatical: one's station and its
duties might have their agreeable side. "It is probably good for you", he
tells us, "to have, say, not less than two glasses of wine after dinner.
Six on ordinary occasions is perhaps too many; but as to three or four,
they are neither one way nor the other." If the voluptuary was condemned,
it was for the commonplace reason which a hedonist, too, might invoke,
that a life of pleasure soon palls and becomes unpleasant. Bradley's
objection to pleasure was merely speculative: he found it too "abstract".
To call a pleasure when actually felt an abstraction is an exquisite
absurdity: but pleasure, in its absolute essence, is certainly simple and
indefinable. If instead of enjoying it on the wing, and as an earnest of
the soul's momentary harmony, we attempt to arrest and observe it, we find
it strangely dumb; we are not informed by it concerning its occasion, nor
carried from it by any logical implication to the natural object in which
it might be found. A pure hedonist ought therefore to be rather relieved
if all images lapsed from his consciousness and he could luxuriate in
sheer pleasure, dark and overwhelming. True, such bliss would be rather
inhuman, and of the sort which we rashly assign to the oyster: but why
should a radical and intrepid philosopher be ashamed of that? The
condition of Bradley's Absolute--feeling in which all distinctions are