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For Freud this absence of emotion is much more characteristic of humour than of the comic, two matters that Bergson quite fails to distinguish. Then, whereas Freud explains the subjective side of the comic purely on hedonic principles, Bergson sees in it an important social function.
For the spirit of it all was a spirit of temperance, of moderation, of secure tranquillity a spirit stoic rather than epicurean, ascetic rather than hedonic, yet generous, spacious, nobly reasonable, giving ample scope for very sincere, if soberly-clad pleasures, and for activities by no means despicable or unmanly, though of a modest, unostentatious sort.
It raises the hedonic tone of consciousness; it brings about, when taken in proper amounts, the well-known happy-go-lucky, scruple-free, expansive state of mind. What now is the price that must be paid for its use? The physical harmfulness of even light drinking is considerable.
It is not true that we inevitably act along the line of least hedonic resistance, that pain necessarily veers us off and pleasure irresistibly attracts. By force of will, by "suggestion" or training, we can go directly counter to the pull of pleasure. It is true that we should not have the instincts and habits and impulses that we do were they not in general useful for our existence or happiness.
Philosophy is reduced to logics, esthetics, and ethics, accordingly as it studies science, art, or morality. Another category remains excluded namely, that of the pleasing and the unpleasing, or the agreeable and the disagreeable: in other words, the hedonic. The hedonic cannot, according to them, pretend to universal validity, it cannot be normative.
But the evolutionary process has been clumsy; we are not properly adjusted; we become the victims of ideas fixes; ideas and activities obsess us quite without relation to their hedonic value. So pleasure and pain are not usually the impelling force or conscious motive behind conduct. What they are is-the touchstone, the criterion, the justification.
The religious is the transcendental economic or hedonic. Religion is a transcendental economy and hedonistic. That which man seeks in religion, in religious faith, is to save his own individuality, to eternalize it, which he achieves neither by science, nor by art, nor by ethics. God is a necessity neither for science, nor art, nor ethics; what necessitates God is religion.
Music is mere feeling, the fulness of human experience, not in the hedonic sense of modern tendencies, but of pure joys and profound sorrows that spring from elemental relations, of man to man, of mate to mate. Here lies the nobility of the common people and of its song; the national phase is a mere incident of political conditions. The war of races is no alembic for beauty of art.
And the discovery of the normative value of the economic grade, which seeks the hedonic, was not unnaturally the work of an Italian, a disciple of Machiavelli, who speculated so fearlessly with regard to virtù, practical efficiency, which is not exactly the same as moral virtue. But at bottom this economic grade is but the rudimentary state of the religious grade.
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