in mind in debating the question how far it is right to act for the
pleasure that the action gives. It is certainly wrong to act for mere
animal gratification. Such gratification is a stimulus to us to do
that which makes for the well-being of our nature: to fling away all
intention of any good other than the delight of the action, is to
mistake the incentive for the end proposed. But this is a doctrine
easily misunderstood. An example may save it from being construed too
rigidly. Suppose a man has a vinery, and being fond of fruit he goes
there occasionally, and eats, not for hunger, but as he says, because
he likes grapes. He seems to act for mere pleasure: yet who shall be
stern enough to condemn him, so that he exceed not in quantity? If he
returns from the vinery in a more amiable and charitable mood, more
satisfied with Providence, more apt to converse with men and do his
work in the commonwealth, who can deny that in acting in view of these
ends, at least implicitly, he has taken lawful means to a proper
purpose? He has not been fed, but recreated: he has not taken
nourishment, but medicine, preventive or remedial, to a mind diseased.
It is no doubt a sweet and agreeable medicine: this very agreeableness
makes its medical virtue. It is a sweet antidote to the bitterness of
life. But though a man may live by medicine, he does not live for it.
So no man by rights lives for pleasure. The pleasure that a man finds
in his work encourages him to go on with it. The pleasure that a man
finds by turning aside to what is not work, picks him up, rests and
renovates him, that he may go forth as from a wayside inn, or
_diverticulum_, refreshed to resume the road of labour. Hence we
gather the solution of the question as to the lawfulness of acting for
pleasure. If a man does a thing because it is pleasant, and takes the
pleasure as an incentive to carry on his labour, or as a remedy to
enable him to resume it, he acts for pleasure rightly. For this it is
not necessary that he should expressly think of the pleasure as being