INTRODUCTION

Mill’s in Utilitarianism. Mill’s is much the less consistent: at times he distinguishes and at times he identifies, happiness, pleasure, contentment, and satisfaction. He wavers between belief in its general attainability and an absence of hopefulness. He mixes up in an arbitrary way such ingredients as “not expecting more from life than it is capable of bestowing,” “mental cultivation,” “improved laws,” etc., and in fact leaves the whole conception vague, blurred, and uncertain. Aristotle draws the outline with a firmer hand and presents a more definite ideal. He allows for the influence on happiness of conditions only partly, if at all, within the control of man, but he clearly makes the man positive determinant of man’s happiness he in himself, and more particularly in what he makes directly of his own nature, and so indirectly of his circumstances. “‘Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus” But once more this does not involve an artificial or abstract isolation of the individual moral agent from his relation to other persons or things from his context in society and nature, nor ignore the relative dependence of his life upon a favourable environment.