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The Pursuit of Happiness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Henry Steele Commager
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Extract

In the eighteenth century all the philosophers were moralists, whatever their philosophy, whatever their religion. They were not pious, they were not devout, certainly they were not orthodox, but they had a religion all the same. It was the religion of happiness. That is what they were after in morals, politics, society; that is what they were after in life itself. Not the answer to the old question, what shall I do to be saved, nor the more familiar question, what is man's whole duty to God. No, theirs was a secular religion. What must man do to be happy? What should government do to assure happiness to its citizens? Pope had made this clear, Pope who summed up so neatly what the age thought:

О Happiness! Our being's end and aim good, pleasure, ease, content, whate'er thy name: that something still which prompts the eternal sigh for which we bear to live, or dare to die.

(Essay on Man, IV, I, 1 ff.)

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 13 , Issue 49 , March 1965 , pp. 40 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © 1965 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

1 Pennsylvania had no monopoly on felicity. Connecticut commanded respect, and so too Virginia. Gaspard de Beaurieu dedicated his Elève de la Nature (Nature's Pupil) to the Inhabitants of Virginia. " In that land," he wrote somewhat wildly, " there are to be found neither cities nor luxuries, nor crimes, nor infirmities. Every day of your lives is serene, for the purity of your souls is communicated to the skies above you … You are as nature would wish us all to be." (Elève de la Nature, qt. in Echevarria, Mirage in the West, p. 32-33).