up could he know that the people in the gallery would be burnt to death if he did not.  He would certainly not give it up because by the sight of his proceedings the moral tone of the stalls might be infinitesimally lowered; still less would he do so because another wife’s husband might be made infinitely jealous.  Whenever we give up any source of personal happiness for the sake of the happiness of the community at large, the two kinds of happiness have to be weighed together in a balance.  But the latter, except in very few cases, is at a great disadvantage:  only a part of it, so to speak, can be got into the scale.  What adds to my sense of pleasure in the proportion of a million pounds may be only taxing society in the proportion of half a farthing a head.  Unselfishness with regard to society is thus essentially a different thing from unselfishness with regard to an individual.  In the latter case the things to be weighed together are commensurate:  not so is the former.  In the latter case, as we have seen, an impassioned self-devotion may be at times produced by the sudden presentation to a man of two extreme alternatives; but in the former case such alternatives are not presentable.  I may know that a certain line of conduct will on the one hand give me great pleasure, and that on the other hand, if it were practised by everyone, it would produce much general mischief; but I shall know that my practising it, will, as a fact, be hardly felt at all by the community, or at all events only in a very small degree.  And therefore my choice is not that of the sailor’s in the shipwreck.  It does not lie between saving my life at the expense of a woman’s, or saving a woman’s life at the expense of mine.  It lies rather, as it were, between letting her lose her ear-ring and breaking my own arm.

It will appear, therefore, that the general conditions of an entirely undefined happiness form an ideal utterly unfitted to counterbalance individual temptation or, to give even willingness, let alone ardour, to the self-denials that are required of us.  In the first place the conditions are so vague that even in the extremest cases the individual will find it difficult to realise that he is appreciably disturbing them.  And in the second place, until he knows that the happiness in question is something of extreme value he will be unable to feel much ardour in helping to make it possible.  If we knew that the social organism in its state of completest health had no higher pleasure than sleep and eating, the cause of its completest health would hardly excite enthusiasm.  And even if we did not rebel against any sacrifices for so poor a result as this, we should at the best be resigned rather than blest in making them.  The nearest approach to a moral end that the science of sociology will of itself supply to us is an end that, in all probability, men will not follow at all, or that will produce in them, if they do, no happier state than a passionless and passive acquiescence.  If we