The English Utilitarians, Volume 3Duckworth and Company, 1900 |
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Popular passages
Page 301 - Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.
Page 200 - I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.
Page 22 - In disconnection, dead and spiritless ; And still dividing and dividing still, Break down all grandeur, still unsatisfied With the perverse attempt, while littleness May yet become more little ; waging thus An impious warfare with the very life Of our own souls.
Page 430 - I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellowcreatures ; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.
Page 98 - Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable.
Page 300 - I think it has superabundantly shown the possibility of giving to the service of humanity, even without the aid of belief in a Providence, both the...
Page 304 - It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognise the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.
Page 300 - The utilitarian morality does recognize in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase or tend to increase the...
Page 314 - That which is the result of habit affords no presumption of being intrinsically good ; and there would be no reason for wishing that the purpose of virtue should become independent of pleasure and pain, were...
Page 418 - The conditioned is the mean between two extremes— two inconditionates, exclusive of each other, neither of which can be conceived as possible, but of which, on the principles of contradiction and excluded middle, one must be admitted as necessary.