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Updated: May 5, 2025
It appears absurd to say that man ought to do what it is not in man, under any conceivable circumstances, to do. And, like other forms of intuitionism, it has the merit of avoiding that short-circuiting which may easily prove seductive to the egoist or the utilitarian.
The man who had really stirred the world was Byron; and if the decline of Byron's fame has resulted partly from real defects, it is partly due also to the fact that his poetry was so admirably adapted to his contemporaries. Byron at least could see facts as clearly as any Utilitarian, though fact coloured by intense passion.
On the present occasion, I shall, without further discussion of the other theories, attempt to contribute something towards the understanding and appreciation of the Utilitarian or Happiness theory, and towards such proof as it is susceptible of. It is evident that this cannot be proof in the ordinary and popular meaning of the term. Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof.
This paradox, for such it is, has mainly acquired notoriety though the advocacy of Hobbes, though it has sometimes been ignorantly attributed to Bentham and other writers of what is called the utilitarian school.
But loyalty and attachment are but fancies, which, in these utilitarian and trading days, are flat and unprofitable; yet the aristocratical manufacturers of beef and mutton may live to feel the truth of the lines of Goldsmith: "But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied."
He thought how much better he would have done in another age, and how out of sympathy he was with the utilitarian dullness of the present time; how much more brilliant he would have been had he lived at any other period of the Temple's history.
Indeed, the art seemed to have died out root and branch, and only necessary and utilitarian needlework was practiced. It seems strange, after all the wonderful triumphs of the needle in earlier years, that for the succeeding half or three-quarters of a century needlework as an art should actually have ceased to be. It had died, branch and stem and root, vanished as if it had never been.
But the fact that he and his first disciples did not think such analysis and discussion necessary goes far to show that the temper created in his Order was not religiously utilitarian. It never occurred to them to look at things that way. The eightfold path is the road to happiness but it is the way, not the destination, and the action of the Buddha and his disciples is something beyond it.
Individualism, in the old, utilitarian sense, passed away because it failed to build a State wherein a channel of expression might be found for the creative energies of humble men. It is only within the last two decades that we have begun to understand the inner significance of the protest against this economic liberalism.
How did it happen that this bustling, nineteenth-century man, full of the almost cock-sure common-sense of the utilitarian and liberal epoch, came to associate his name chiefly in literary history with the perpetuation of a half pagan and half Catholic festival which he would certainly have called an antiquity and might easily have called a superstition?
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