all work for one another, and that our happiness is to be found in that.
The question merely confronts us with two other facets of itself. What
sort of happiness shall I secure for others? and what sort of happiness
will others secure for me? What will it be like? Will it be worth
having? In the positivist Utopia, we are told, each man's happiness is
bound up in the happiness of all the rest, and is thus infinitely
intensified. All mankind are made a mighty whole, by the fusing power of
benevolence. Benevolence, however, means simply the wishing that our
neighbours were happy, the helping to make them so, and lastly the being
glad that they are so. But happiness must plainly be something besides
benevolence; else, if I know that a man's highest happiness is in
knowing that others are happy, all I shall try to procure for others is
the knowledge that I am happy; and thus the Utopian happiness would be
expressed completely in the somewhat homely formula, '_I am so glad that
you are glad that I am glad_.' But this is, of course, not enough. All
this gladness must be about something besides itself. Our good wishes
for our neighbours must have some farther content than that they shall
wish us well in return. What I wish them and what they wish me must be
something that both they and I, each of us, take delight in for
ourselves. It will certainly be no delight to men to procure for others
what they will take no delight in themselves, if procured by others for
them. '_For a joyful life, that is to say a pleasant life_,' as Sir
Thomas More pithily puts it, '_is either evil; and if so, then thou
shouldest not only help no man thereto, but rather as much as in thee
lieth withdraw all men from it as noisome and hurtful; or else if thou
not only mayest, but also of duty art bound to procure it for others,
why not chiefly for thyself, to whom thou art bound to show as much
favour and gentleness as to others?_' The fundamental question is, then,
what life should a man try to procure for himself? How shall he make it
most joyful? and how joyful will it be when he has done his utmost for