the distance, I am deeply free to walk as I will.  The choice of pleasure for a principle of morals was particularly unfortunate in the British utilitarians; it lent them an air of frivolity absurdly contrary to their true character.  Pleasure might have been a fit enough word in the mouth of Aristippus, a semi-oriental untouched by the least sense of responsibility, or even on the lips of humanists in the eighteenth century, who, however sordid their lives may sometimes have been, could still move in imagination to the music of Mozart, in the landscape of Watteau or of Fragonard.  But in the land and age of Dickens the moral ideal was not so much pleasure as kindness:  this tenderer word not only expresses better the motive at work, but it points to the distressing presence of misery in the world, to make natural kindness laborious and earnest, and turn it into a legislative system.

Bradley’s hostility to pleasure was not fanatical:  one’s station and its duties might have their agreeable side.  “It is probably good for you”, he tells us, “to have, say, not less than two glasses of wine after dinner.  Six on ordinary occasions is perhaps too many; but as to three or four, they are neither one way nor the other.”  If the voluptuary was condemned, it was for the commonplace reason which a hedonist, too, might invoke, that a life of pleasure soon palls and becomes unpleasant.  Bradley’s objection to pleasure was merely speculative:  he found it too “abstract”.  To call a pleasure when actually felt an abstraction is an exquisite absurdity:  but pleasure, in its absolute essence, is certainly simple and indefinable.  If instead of enjoying it on the wing, and as an earnest of the soul’s momentary harmony, we attempt to arrest and observe it, we find it strangely dumb; we are not informed by it concerning its occasion, nor carried from it by any logical implication to the natural object in which it might be found.  A pure hedonist ought therefore to be rather relieved if all images lapsed from his consciousness and he could luxuriate in sheer pleasure, dark and overwhelming.  True, such bliss would be rather inhuman, and of the sort which we rashly assign to the oyster:  but why should a radical and intrepid philosopher be ashamed of that?  The condition of Bradley’s Absolute—­feeling in which all distinctions are transcended and merged—­seems to be something of that kind; but there would be a strange irony in attributing this mystical and rapturous ideal to such ponderous worthies as Mill and Spencer, whose minds were nothing if not anxious, perturbed, instrumental, and full of respect for variegated facts, and who were probably incapable of tasting pure pleasure at all.