should control my activity. The theory then that what is desired is always and only pleasure must break down: it is impossible to prove that pleasure alone is good, by that line of argument. But, if we substitute for this theory, that other, possibly true, theory, that pleasure is always the cause of desire, then all the plausibility of our ethical doctrine that pleasure alone is good straightaway disappears. For in this case, pleasure is not what I desire, it is not what I want: it is something which I already have, before I can want anything. And can any one feel inclined to maintain, that that which I already have, while I am still desiring something else, is always and alone the good?
43. But now let us return to consider another of Mill’s arguments for his position that ‘happiness is the sole end of human action.’ Mill admits, as I have said, that pleasure is not the only thing we actually desire. ‘The desire of virtue,’ he says, ‘is not as universal, but is as authentic a fact, as the desire of happiness.[1]’ And again, ‘Money is, in many cases, desired in and for itself[2].’ These admissions are, of course, in naked and glaring contradiction with his argument that pleasure is the only thing desirable, because it is the only thing desired. How then does Mill even attempt to avoid this contradiction? His chief argument seems to be that ‘virtue,’ ‘money’ and other such objects, when they are thus desired in and for themselves, are desired only as ‘a part of happiness[3].’ Now what does this mean? Happiness, as we saw, has been defined by Mill, as ‘pleasure and the absence of pain.’ Does Mill mean to say that ‘money,’ these actual coins, which he admits to be desired in and for themselves, are a part either of pleasure or of the absence of pain? Will he maintain that those coins themselves are in my mind, and actually a part of my pleasant feelings? If this is to be said, all words are useless: nothing can possibly be distinguished from anything else; if these two things are not distinct, what on earth is? We shall hear next that this table is really and truly the same thing as this room; that a cab-horse is in fact indistinguishable from St Paul’s Cathedral; that this book of Mill’s which I hold in
