transcended and merged--seems to be something of that kind; but there
would be a strange irony in attributing this mystical and rapturous ideal
to such ponderous worthies as Mill and Spencer, whose minds were nothing
if not anxious, perturbed, instrumental, and full of respect for
variegated facts, and who were probably incapable of tasting pure pleasure
at all.

But if pleasure, in its pure essence, might really be the highest good for
a mystic who should be lost in it, it would be no guide to a moralist
wishing to control events, and to distribute particular pleasures or
series of pleasures as richly as possible in the world. For this purpose
he would need to understand human nature and its variable functions, in
which different persons and peoples may find their sincere pleasures; and
this knowledge would first lend to his general love of pleasure any point
of application in the governance of life or in benevolent legislation.
Some concrete image of a happy human world would take the place of the
futile truism that pleasure is good and pain evil. This is, of course,
what utilitarian moralists meant to do, and actually did, in so far as
their human sympathies extended, which was not to the highest things; but
it was not what they said, and Bradley had a clear advantage over them in
the war of words. A pleasure is not a programme: it exists here and not
there, for me and for no one else, once and never again. When past, it
leaves the will as empty and as devoid of allegiance as if it had never
existed; pleasure is sand, though it have the colour of gold. But this is
evidently true of all existence. Each living moment, each dead man, each
cycle of the universe leaves nothing behind it but a void which perhaps
something kindred may refill. A Hegel, after identifying himself for a
moment with the Absolute Idea, is in his existence no less subject to
sleepiness, irritation, and death than if he had been modestly satisfied
with the joys of an oyster. It is only their common form, or their common