Book ii. chap. ii.) says that “by many of the best of the ancient

moralists ... the whole of ethics was reduced to this question ... What is most conducive on the whole to our happiness?” the remark, if not exactly false, is certain to mislead his readers; since by Stewart, as by most English writers, “Happiness” is definitely conceived as consisting of “Pleasures” or “Enjoyments.”

[82] Thus Green (_Prolegomena to Ethics_, Book iii. chap. iv. § 228) says, “It is the realisation of those objects in which we are mainly interested, _not the succession of enjoyments which we shall experience in realising them_, that forms the definite content of our idea of true happiness, so far as it has such content at all.” Cf. also § 238. It is more remarkable to find J. S. Mill (_Utilitarianism_, chap. iv.) declaring that “money”--no less than “power” or “fame”--comes by association of ideas to be “a part of happiness,” an “ingredient in the individual’s conception of happiness.” But this seems to be a mere looseness of phraseology, venial in a treatise aiming at a popular style; since Mill has expressly said that “by happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain,” and he cannot mean that money is either the one or the other. In fact he uses in the same passage--as an alternative phrase for “parts of happiness”--the phrases “sources of happiness” and “sources of pleasure”: and his real meaning is more precisely expressed by these latter terms. That is, the distinction which he is really concerned to emphasise is that between the state of mind in which money is valued solely as a means of buying other things, and the state of mind--such as the miser’s--in which the mere consciousness of possessing it gives pleasure, apart from any idea of spending it.

[83] See Sermon XI. “... the cool principle of self-love or general desire of our own happiness.”

[84] _Utilitarianism_, chap. ii.