But if pleasure, in its pure essence, might really be the highest good for a mystic who should be lost in it, it would be no guide to a moralist wishing to control events, and to distribute particular pleasures or series of pleasures as richly as possible in the world.  For this purpose he would need to understand human nature and its variable functions, in which different persons and peoples may find their sincere pleasures; and this knowledge would first lend to his general love of pleasure any point of application in the governance of life or in benevolent legislation.  Some concrete image of a happy human world would take the place of the futile truism that pleasure is good and pain evil.  This is, of course, what utilitarian moralists meant to do, and actually did, in so far as their human sympathies extended, which was not to the highest things; but it was not what they said, and Bradley had a clear advantage over them in the war of words.  A pleasure is not a programme:  it exists here and not there, for me and for no one else, once and never again.  When past, it leaves the will as empty and as devoid of allegiance as if it had never existed; pleasure is sand, though it have the colour of gold.  But this is evidently true of all existence.  Each living moment, each dead man, each cycle of the universe leaves nothing behind it but a void which perhaps something kindred may refill.  A Hegel, after identifying himself for a moment with the Absolute Idea, is in his existence no less subject to sleepiness, irritation, and death than if he had been modestly satisfied with the joys of an oyster.  It is only their common form, or their common worship, that can give to the quick moments of life any mutual relevance or sympathy; and existence would not come at all within sight of a good, either momentary or final, if it were not inwardly directed upon realising some definite essence.  For the rest this essence may be as simple as you will, if the nature directed upon it is unified and simple; and it would be mere intellectual snobbery to condemn pleasure because it has not so many subdivisions in it as an encyclopaedia of the sciences.  For the moralist pleasure and pain may even be the better guides, because they express more directly and boldly the instinctive direction of animal life, and thereby mark more clearly the genuine difference between good and evil.

We may well say with Bradley that the good is self-realisation; but what is the self?  Certainly not the feeling or consciousness of the moment, nor the life of the world, nor pure spirit.  The self that can systematically distinguish good from evil is an animal soul.  It grows from a seed; its potentiality is definite and its fate precarious; and in man it requires society to rear it and tradition to educate it.  The good is accordingly social, in so far as the soul demands society; but it is the nature of the individual that determines the kind and degree of sociability that