has consented, for distributing those conveniences of life which afford
us all our pleasures.

"They think it is an evidence of true wisdom for a man to pursue his own
advantage as far as the laws allow it, they account it piety to prefer
the public good to one's private concerns, but they think it unjust for a
man to seek for pleasure by snatching another man's pleasures from him;
and, on the contrary, they think it a sign of a gentle and good soul for
a man to dispense with his own advantage for the good of others, and that
by this means a good man finds as much pleasure one way as he parts with
another; for as he may expect the like from others when he may come to
need it, so, if that should fail him, yet the sense of a good action, and
the reflections that he makes on the love and gratitude of those whom he
has so obliged, gives the mind more pleasure than the body could have
found in that from which it had restrained itself. They are also
persuaded that God will make up the loss of those small pleasures with a
vast and endless joy, of which religion easily convinces a good soul.

"Thus, upon an inquiry into the whole matter, they reckon that all our
actions, and even all our virtues, terminate in pleasure, as in our chief
end and greatest happiness; and they call every motion or state, either
of body or mind, in which Nature teaches us to delight, a pleasure. Thus
they cautiously limit pleasure only to those appetites to which Nature
leads us; for they say that Nature leads us only to those delights to
which reason, as well as sense, carries us, and by which we neither
injure any other person nor lose the possession of greater pleasures, and
of such as draw no troubles after them. But they look upon those
delights which men by a foolish, though common, mistake call pleasure, as
if they could change as easily the nature of things as the use of words,
as things that greatly obstruct their real happiness, instead of