Let the earth-bound man be handsome and powerful and rich, and so apt to this world that he may rule the entire human race : still there can be no envying him, the fool of such lures. Perhaps such splendours could not, from the beginning even, have gathered to the Sage ; but if it should happen so, he of his own action will lower his state, if he has any care for his true Ufe ; the tyranny of the body he will work down or wear away by inattention to its claims ; the rulership he will lay aside. While he will safeguard his bodily health, he will not wish to be wholly untried in sickness, still less never to feel pain : if such troubles should not come to him of themselves, he will wish to know them, during youth at least : in old age, it is true, he will desire neither pains nor pleasures to hamper him ; he will desire nothing of this world, pleasant or painful ; his one desire will be to know nothing of the body. If he should meet with pain he will pit against it the powers he holds to meet it ; but pleasure and health and ease of life will not mean any increase of happiness to him nor will their contraries destroy or lessen it.
When in the one subject, a positive can add nothing, how can the negative take away ?
But suppose two wise men, one of them possessing all that is supposed to be naturally welcome, while the other meets only with the very reverse : do we assert that they have an equal happiness ?
We do, if they are equally wise.
What though the one be favoured in body and in aU else that does not help towards wisdom, still less towards virtue, towards the vision of the noblest, towards being the highest, what does all that amount to ? The man commanding all such practical advantages cannot flatter himself that he is more truly happy than the man without them : the utmost profusion of such boons would not help even to make a flute- player.
We discuss the happy man after our own feebleness ; we count alarming and grave what his felicity takes lightly : he would be neither wise nor in the state of happiness if he had not quitted all trifling with such things and become as it were another being, having confidence in his own nature, faith that evil can never touch him. In such a spirit he can be fearless through and through ; where there is dread, there is not perfect virtue ; the man is some sort of a half-thing.
As for any involuntary fear rising in him and taking the judgement by surprise, while his thoughts perhaps are elsewhere, the Sage will attack it and drive it out ; he will, so to speak, calm the refractory child within him, whether by reason or by menace, but without passion, as an infant might feel itself rebuked by a glance of severity.
This does not make the Sage unfriendly or harsh : it is to himself and in his own great concern that he is the Sage : giving freely to his intimates of all he has to give, he will be the best of friends by his very union with the Intellectual-Principle.
Those that refuse to place the Sage aloft in the Intellectual Realm but drag him down to the accidental, dreading accident for him, have substituted for the Sage we have in mind another person altogether ; they offer us a tolerable sort of man and they assign to him a life of
mingled good and ill, a case, after all, not easy to conceive. But admitting the possibility of such a mixed state, it could not be deserved to be called a life of happiness ; it misses the Great, both in the dignity of Wisdom and in the integrity of Good. The life of true happiness is not a thing of mixture. And Plato rightly taught that he who is to be wise and to possess happiness draws his good from the Supreme, fixing his gaze on That, becoming like to That, living by That.
He can care for no other Term than That : all else he will attend to only as he might change his residence, not in expectation of any increase to his settled felicity, but simply in a reasonable attention to the differ- ing conditions surrounding him as he lives here or there.
He will give to the body all that he sees to be useful and possible, but he himself remains a member of another order, not prevented from abandoning the body, and necessarily leaving it at nature’s hour, he himself always the master to decide in its regard.
Thus some part of his life considers exclusively the Soul’s satis- faction; the rest is not immediately for the Term’s sake and not for his own sake, but for the thing bound up with him, the thing which he tends and bears with as the musician cares for his lyre, as long as it can serve him : when the lyre fails him, he will change it, or will give up lyre and lyring, as having another craft now, one that needs no lyre, and then he will let it rest unregarded at his side while he sings on without an instrument. But it was not idly that the instrument was given him in the beginning : he has found it useful until now, many a time.
Happiness and Extension of Time
Is it possible to think that Happiness increases with Time, Happi- ness which is always taken as a present thing ?
The memory of former felicity may surely be ruled out of count, for Happiness is not a thing of words, but a definite condition which must be actually present like the very fact and act of life.
Time and Happiness
It may be objected that our will towards living and towards expres- sive activity is constant, and that each attainment of such expression is an increase in Happiness.
But in the first place, by this reckoning every to-morrow’s well-being will be greater than to-day’s, every later instalment successively larger than an earlier ; at once time supplants moral excellence as the measure of felicity.
Then again the Gods to-day must be happier than of old : and their bliss, too, is not perfect, will never be perfect. Further, when the will attains what it was seeking, it attains something present : the quest is always for something to be actually present until a standing fehcity is definitely achieved. The will to life which is will to Existence aims at something present, since Existence must be a stably present thing. Even when the act of the will is directed towards the future, and the furthest future, its object is an actually present having and being : there is no concern about what is passed or to come : the future state a man seeks is to be a now to him ; he does not care about the forever ; he asks that an actual present be actually present.
Yes, but if the well-being has lasted a long time, if that present spectacle has been a longer time before the eyes ?
If in the greater length of time the man has seen more deeply, time has certainly done something for him, but if all the process has brought him no further vision, then one glance would give all he has had.
Still the one life has known pleasure longer than the other ?
But pleasure cannot be fairly reckoned in with Happiness — unless indeed by pleasure is meant the unhindered Act (of the true man), in which case this pleasure is simply our “ Happiness.” And even pleasure, though it exist continuously, has never anything but the present ; its past is over and done with.
We are asked to believe, then, it will be objected, that if one man has been happy from first to last, another only at the last, and a third, beginning with happiness, has lost it, their shares are equal ?
This is straying from the question : we were comparing the happy among themselves : now we are asked to compare the not-happy at the time when they are out of happiness with those in actual possession of happiness. If these last are better off, they are so as men in possession of happiness against men without it and their advantage is always by something in the present.
Well, but take the unhappy man : must not increase of time bring an increase of his unhappiness ? Do not all troubles— long-lasting pains, sorrows, and everything of that type — yield a greater sum of misery in the longer time ? And if thus in misery the evil is augmented by time why should not time equally augment happiness when all is well ?
In the matter of sorrows and pains there is, no doubt, ground for saying that time brings increase : for example, in a lingering malady the evil hardens into a state, and as time goes on the body is brought lower and lower. But if the constitution did not deteriorate, if the mischief grew no worse, then, here too, there would be no trouble but that of the present moment : we cannot tell the past into the tale of unhappiness except in the sense that it has gone to make up an actually existing state — in the sense that, the evil in the sufferer’s condition having been extended over a longer time, the mischief has gained ground. The increase of ill-being then is due to the aggravation of the malady not to the extension of time.
It may be pointed out also that this greater length of time is not a thing existent at any given moment ; and surely a “ more ” is not to be made out by adding to something actually present something that has passed away.
No : true happiness is not vague and fluid : it is an unchanging state.
Time and Happiness
If there is in this matter any increase besides that of mere time, it is in the sense that a greater happiness is the reward of a higher virtue : this is not counting up to the credit of happiness the years of its con- tinuance ; it is simply noting the high-water mark once for all attained.
But if we are to consider only the present and may not call in the past to make the total, why do we not reckon so in the case of time itself, where, in fact, we do not hesitate to add the past to the present and call the total greater ? Why not suppose a quantity of happiness equivalent to a quantity of time ? This would be no more than taking it lap by lap to correspond with time-laps instead of choosing to consider it as an indivisible, measurable only by the content of a given instant.
There is no absurdity in taking count of time which has ceased to be : we are merely counting what is past and finished, as we might count the dead : but to treat past happiness as actually existent and as out- weighing present happiness, that is an absurdity. For Happiness must be an achieved and existent state, whereas any time over and apart from the present is non-existent : all progress of time means the extinction of all the time that has been.
Hence time is aptly described as a mimic of eternity that seeks to break up in its fragmentary flight the permanence of its exemplar. Thus whatever time seizes and seals to itself of what stands permanent in eternity is annihilated — saved only in so far as in some degree it still belongs to eternity, but wholly destroyed if it be unreservedly absorbed into time.
If Happiness demands the possession of the good of life, it clearly has to do with the life of Authentic-Existence for that life is the Best. Now the life of Authentic-Existence is measurable not by time but by eternity ; and eternity is not a more or a less or a thing of any magnitude but is the unchangeable, the indivisible, is timeless Being.
We must not muddle together Being and Non-Being, time and eternity, not even everlasting time with the eternal ; we cannot make laps and stages of an absolute unity ; all must be taken together, where-
soever and howsoever we handle it ; and it must be taken at that, not even as an undivided block of time but as the Life of Eternity, a stretch not made up of periods but completely rounded, outside of all notion of time.
It may be urged that the actual presence of past experiences, kept present by Memory, gives the advantage to the man of the longer felicity.