In the first place, it assumes that the three requisites—­health, freedom from debt, and a good conscience—­are matters of easy and general attainment; that they are, in fact, the rule among human beings.  Is this really so?

Take Health, a word of very wide import.  There is a certain small amount, such as is marked by being out of the physician’s hands, but implying very little of the energy needed for the labours and the enjoyment of life.  There is a high and resplendent degree that renders toil easy, and responds to the commonest stimulants, so that enjoyment cannot be quashed without unusually unfavourable circumstances.  The first kind is widely diffused; the second is very rare, except in the earlier portion of life.  Most men and women, as they pass middle age, lose the elasticity required for easy and spontaneous enjoyment, and, even if they keep the appearance of health, have too little animal spirits for enjoyment under cheap and ordinary excitements.

But there is more to be said.  In order to obtain, and to retain, health, freedom from debt, and a good conscience, there are pre-supposed very considerable advantages.  We cannot continue healthy and out of debt, unless we have a fair start in life, that is, unless we have a tolerable provision to begin with; a circumstance that the maxim keeps out of sight.

Yet farther.  The conditions named are of themselves mere negatives; they imply simply the absence of certain decided causes of unhappiness—­ill-health, poverty, and bad conduct.  There is a farther stealthy assumption, namely, that the individual is placed in a situation otherwise conducive to happiness.  Health, absence of debt, and a good conscience will not make happiness, under severe or ungenial toil, irritation, ill-usage, affliction, sorrow,—–­ even if they could be long maintained under such circumstances.  Nor even, in the case of exemption from the worst ills of life, can we be happy without some positive agreeables—­family, general society, amusements, and gratifications.  There is a certain degree of loneliness, seclusion, dulness, that destroys happiness without sapping health, or miming us into debt and vice.

The maxim, as expressed, professes to aim at happiness, but it more properly belongs to duty.  If we fail in the conditions mentioned, we run the risk rather of neglecting our duties than of missing our pleasures.  It is not every form of ill-health that makes us miserable; and we may become seared to debt and ill-conduct, so as to suffer only the incidental misery of being dunned, which many can take with great composure.

The definition of happiness by Paley is vague and incomplete; but it does not omit the positive conditions.  After health, Paley enumerates the exercise of the affections and some engaging occupation or pursuit; both which are highly relevant to the attainment of happiness.  Indeed with an exemption from cares, and a considerable share of the positive gratifications, we can enjoy life on a very slender stock of health; otherwise, where should we be in the inevitable decline that age brings with it?]