The socialist believes that the dispositions pursue the economic interest of a class; the hedonist believes that they pursue pleasure and avoid pain.
You will soon be saying that the hedonist begs the question, for even supposing that man does pursue these ends, the crucial problem of why he thinks one course rather than another likely to produce pleasure, is untouched.
But probably no Hedonist would expressly maintain this; though such an assumption, no doubt, is frequently made by writers of the Intuitional school.
The second confusion is the tacit assumption that the pleasure of the hedonist is necessarily or characteristically of a purely physical kind; this assumption is in the case of some hedonistic theories a pure perversion of the facts.
The true hedonist will aim at a life of enduring rational happiness; pleasure is the end of life, but true pleasure can be obtained only under the guidance of reason.
Your pleasure," the psychologicalhedonist would say, "is desired by me quâ my pleasure.
It may be possible, that is to say, to be an evolutionist in psychology and sociology, at the same time that one is a hedonist in ethics.
The feelings inherited by the egoistic hedonist are assessed by him at their pleasure-value.
In an hedonist age pleasure has always sunk low, so that it has to be encouraged.
We call our own time hedonistand full of praise and pleasure.
Thus anHedonist cannot be Altruist to boot; and, trying to combine the two characters, the Utilitarian is committed to a self-contradiction.
The Hedonist seeks his own pleasure, where the Altruist forbids him to take thought, let alone for his gratification, but even for his good.
The confessed Hedonist, enjoying life and boasting of it just a little, and yet the Puritan in him, as it were, all the time eyeing himself as from some loophole of retreat, and then commenting on his own behaviour as a Hedonist and Bohemian.
Had he been the mere Hedonist he could never have done the work he did.
His hedonism is but the uncritically accepted metaphysics comprised in the common sense of his time, and his substantial coincidence with Bentham goes to show how well diffused the hedonist preconception was at the time.
