theory.  To the accusation that pleasure is a mean and grovelling object of pursuit, the answer is, that human beings are capable of pleasures that are not grovelling.  It is compatible with utility to recognize some kinds of pleasure as more valuable than others.  There are pleasures that, irrespective of amount, are held by all persons that have experienced them to be preferable to others.  Few human beings would consent to become beasts, or fools, or base, in consideration of a greater allowance of pleasure.  Inseparable from the estimate of pleasure is a sense of dignity, which determines a preference among enjoyments.

But this distinction in kind is not essential to the justification of the standard of Utility.  That standard is not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.  However little the higher virtues might contribute to one’s own happiness, there can be no doubt that the world in general gains by them.

Another objection to the doctrine is, that happiness is a thing unattainable, and that no one has a right to it.  Not only can men do without happiness, but renunciation is the first condition of all nobleness of character.

In reply, the author remarks that, supposing happiness impossible, the prevention of unhappiness might still be an object, which is a mode of Utility.  But the alleged impossibility of happiness is either a verbal quibble or an exaggeration.  No one contends for a life of sustained rapture; occasional moments of such, in an existence of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a predominance of the active over the passive, and moderate expectations on the whole, constitute a life worthy to be called happiness.  Numbers of mankind have been satisfied with much less.  There are two great factors of enjoyment—­tranquillity and excitement.  With the one, little pleasure will suffice; with the other, considerable pain can be endured.  It does not appear impossible to secure both in alternation.  The principal defect in persons of fortunate lot is to care for nobody but themselves; this curtails the excitements of life, and makes everything dwindle as the end approaches.  Another circumstance rendering life unsatisfactory is the want of mental cultivation, by which men are deprived of the inexhaustible pleasures of knowledge, not merely in the shape of science, but as practice and fine art.  It is not at all difficult to indicate sources of happiness; the main stress of the problem lies in the contest with the positive evils of life, the great sources of physical and of mental suffering—­indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature loss of objects of affection.  Poverty and Disease may be contracted in dimensions; and even vicissitudes of fortune are not wholly beyond control.