CHAPTER XI. MIXED PLEASURE. T XI. HE first thing which must strike any CHAPTER The diffi culty of pain from sense of pain. It is attended with pain; it separating easily turns to pain; and we have constantly to pleasure. ask ourselves—is not this pleasure a pain? is not this pain a pleasure? Says Keble: There is an awe in mortals' joy : A deep mysterious fear Half of the heart will still employ, As if we drew too near To Eden's portal, and those fires That bicker round in wavy spires, Forbidding to our frail desires What cost us once so dear. statement That no doubt is the song of a divine, who in Theological connection with such a topic naturally has in his of the fact. thoughts the fall of our first parents, and the VOL. II. D XI. mystery CHAPTER loss of Paradise, never more in this life to be regained; but the fact itself, the singular intimacy and union of pain with pleasure, we all acknowledge. There are tears and pangs of joy; there is laughter of grief and luxury of woe; and as we look upon such contradictions. And the we are lost in wonder of a mystery that seems that belongs to pass understanding; we appear to be on the verge of unreason; we doubt whether we are dealing with realities at all; we are half afraid to speak what we think, and the language of prose is too rough, too poor, to tell of the delicacy, the complexity, and the changeableness of a feeling that is, and is not, and is again, swifter than the tints of a bubble-swifter than the tints of a coryphene that dies. to it. This couleur changeante which we know as pleasure, but which is shot with pain, suggested the earliest well-wrought theory of pleasure, The earliest namely, the Platonic. The theory of Plato, startwrought ing from that of Aristippus and the Cyrenaics, is pleasure that pleasure is nothing of itself, but only escape from momentary escape from pain, or a passage from pain. one pain to another. In modern times this view well theory of that it is an has been maintained independently by Kant, whose exposition of the doctrine will be more intelligible now-a-days than that of the ancient How the philosopher. "Pleasure is always a consequent of pain," says Kant, in Sir William Hamilton's pounded by translation. "When we cast our eyes on the doctrine was ex Kant. XI. progress of things, we discover in ourselves a CHAPTER ceaseless tendency to escape from our present state. To this we are compelled by a physical stimulus, which sets animals and man as an animal into activity. But in the intellectual nature of man there is also a stimulus which operates to the same end. In thought, man is always dissatisfied with the actual; he is ever looking forward from the present to the future; he is incessantly in a state of transition from one state to another, and is unable to continue in the What is it that thus constrains us to be always passing from one state to another, but pain? same. is but be blest. "And that it is not a pleasure which entices Man never us to this, but a kind of discontent with pre- always to sent suffering, is shown by the fact that we are always seeking for some object of pleasure, without knowing what that object is, merely as an aid against the disquiet-against the complement of petty pains, which for the moment irritate and annoy us. It is thus apparent that man is urged on by a necessity of his nature to go out of the present as a state of pain, in order to find in the future one less irksome. Man thus finds himself in a never-ceasing pain; and this is the spur for the activity of human nature. Our lot And lives is so cast that there is nothing enduring for us ceasing pain. but pains; some indeed have less, others more, but all at all times have their share; and our in a never |