Or if we mean, "What is the psychology of happiness?"
the answer is as yet dubious; but it is irrelevant. Whatever its
psychological conditions and the means to attain it, we know happiness
when we have it. The puzzle is not to recognize it, but to get it.
By happiness we mean the steady presence of what we have called intrinsic
goodness and the absence of intrinsic badness; it is as indefinable
as any ultimate element of experience, but as well known to us as
blackness and whiteness or light and dark. Take, as a typical moral
situation, a case in which a thirsty man drinks polluted water. In
the diagram the arrow represents the direction of the flow of time,
and each of the ribbons below represents the stream of consciousness
of an individual concerned-the uppermost being that of the thirsty
man himself, the others those of his wife, children, or friends. The
plus sign early in the drinker's stream of experience stands for the
plus value which drinking the water effects-the gratifying taste of
the water and the allaying of the discomfort of thirst-real values,
whose worth cannot be gainsaid. Following, in his own stream of
experience, are a row of minus signs, indicating the undesirable
penalties in his own life which follow-disease, pain, deprivation of
other goods. No good accrues to others, unless the slight pleasure
of seeing his thirst allayed. But evils follow in their experience:
worry, sympathetic pain at his suffering, expense of doctor's bills,
perhaps (which means deprivation of other possible goods), etc.
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