in thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtuefrom the husks of Pleasure, I tell thee, Nay!  Is the heroic inspiration we name Virtue but some Passion, some bubble of the blood, bubbling in the direction others profit by?  I know not; only this I know, If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray.  ‘Happy,’ my brother?  First of all, what difference is it whether thou art happy or not!  ‘Happiness our being’s end and aim,’ all that very paltry speculation is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world” [Footnote:  Sartor Resartus:  “The Everlasting No” Past and Present:  “Happy” Leaving aside this last statement, which is an irrelevant untruth, we probably feel an instinctive sympathy with Carlyle, and a sort of shame that we should have thought of happiness as the goal of conduct.  Carlyle goes so far in his tirades as to call our happiness-morality a “pig philosophy,” which makes the universe out to be a huge “swine’s trough” from which mankind is trying to get the maximum “pigs” wash.  Again he calls it a “Mechanical Profit-and-Loss theory” In such picturesque language he embodies a point of view which in milder terms has been expressed by many.] But to say that we must often oppose inclination in the name of duty is by no means to say that we must do what in the end will make against happiness.  The trouble with inclination and passion is precisely that they are often ruiners of happiness.  The very real and frequent opposition of desire and duty is no support of the view that duty is irrelevant to happiness, but quite consistent with the rational account of morality-that dates at least back to the ancient Greeks-which shows it to be the means to man’s most lasting and widespread happiness.

Must we deny that duty is the servant of happiness?

We may go on to point out various flaws in the doctrine, of which Carlyle is one of the extreme representatives, that the account of morality as a means to happiness is immoral and leads to shocking results.

(1) The plausibility of the doctrine rests largely on its confusion with the very different truth that we should not make happiness our conscious aim.  It is one of the surest fruits of experience that happiness is best won by forgetting it; he that loses his life shall truly find it.  To think much of happiness slides inevitably over into thinking too much of present happiness, and more of one’s own than others’ happiness; it leads to what Spencer properly dubs “the pursuit of happiness without regard to the conditions by fulfillment of which happiness is to be achieved.”  Carlyle is practically on the right track in bidding us think rather of duty, of work, of accomplishment.  But that is far from denying that these aims have their ultimate justification in the happiness they forward.  In order that remote ends may be attained, it is often necessary to cease thinking of them and concentrate