unsatisfied and hands empty, driven on and beyond for ever in pursuit of a delusion, through a weary round which never advances. There remains, then, to Hedonism either the assertion that happiness is completed in one intense moment, or the confession that happiness is impossible, or the attempt to place it elsewhere than in the sum of pleasures.
The first is the ‘nullo vivere consilio.’ It is the giving up of any practical goal or any rule of life, and we are not called upon to consider it further. The second is inevitable, if happiness is equal to the sum, or the greatest possible amount, of pleasures; for one and the other are the same unreal fiction. The end, in this sense, exists only in the head of the Hedonistic moral man. His morality is the striving to realize an idea, which can never be realized, and which, if realized, would be ipso facto annihilated. He would feel it no objection to his theory, nor any comfort in his sorrow, if we said to him that, if happiness could be, then the tale would be made up, the end would be reached, the search would be over, and with it all morality; for his morality is nothing to him as an end, but only as a means; and the bitterness of his lot is filled up by the thought, that the means he does not care for are always with him, and the end he lusts after away from him.
