Plutology - Or The Theory Of The Efforts To Satisfy Human Wants (1864) (Hardcover)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: desire is repressed; the latter that it is regulated. Content is a judgment that, upon the whole, we cannot with our existing means improve our position, along with an unmurmuring submission to the hardships, if any, of that position. Its aim is, not to satisfy desires; but to appease complaint. It is consequently not inconsistent with the most active efforts to alter that combination of circumstances upon which the judgment was formed. " The desire of amelioration, it has been truly said, is not less a moral principle than patience under afflictions; and the use of content is not to destroy, but to regulate and direct it." 10. So far from our wants being unworthy of our higher nature, we can readily trace their moral function and appreciate its importance. They not only prevent our retrogression, but secure our advancement. Our real state of nature consists not in the repression, but in the full development and satisfaction, of all those faculties of which our nature consists. Such a state is found, not in the poverty of the naked savage; but in the wealth of the civilized man. It is the constant and powerful impulse of our varied and insatiable desires, that urges us to avoid the one state, and to tend towards the other. " Wants and enjoyments," says Bentham, f " these universal agents in society, after having raised the first ears of corn, will by degrees erect the granaries of abundance, always increasing, and always full. Desires extend themselves with the means of gratification; the horizon is enlarged in proportion as we advance, and each new want, equally accompanied by its pleasure and its pain, becomes a new principle of action. Opulence, which is only a comparative term, does not arrest this movement when once it is begun; on the contrary, the greater the Dr...