(3) A further question is as to the purity of this pleasure, i.e,
its freedom from mixture with pain. Most selfish and sensual pleasures,
however keen, are so interwoven with restlessness, shame, or
dissatisfaction, or so inevitably accompanied by a revulsion of
feeling, disgust or loathing, that they must be sharply discounted
in our calculus. Whereas intellectual, aesthetic, religious pleasures
are generally free from such intermixture of pain, and so, though milder,
on the whole preferable even in their immediacy and apart from ultimate
consequences.
(4) But the most imperious need of life lies in the tracing-out and
paying heed to these extrinsic values, these after effects of conduct.
The drinking of alcoholic liquors, for example, not only stills a
craving that arises in a man's mind, not only brings pleasure of taste
and comfort of oblivion, not only brings the quick revulsion of
emotional staleness and headache, but has its gradual and inevitable
effects in undermining the constitution, lessening the power of
resistance to disease, and decreasing the vitality of offspring. Quite
commonly these ultimate consequences are the most important, and so
the determining, factors in deciding our ideals. Among them may be
included the influence of single acts in increasing or decreasing the
power to resist future temptations, and the gradual paralysis of the
will through unchecked self-indulgence.
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