Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have
their appointed office in society. They follow the footsteps of
poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of
common life. They make space, and give time. Their exertions are
of the highest value, so long as they confine their administration
of the concerns of the inferior powers of our nature within the
limits due to the superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys
gross superstitions, let him spare to deface, as some of the
French writers have defaced, the eternal truths charactered upon
the imaginations of men. Whilst the mechanist abridges, and the
political economist combines labour, let them beware that their
speculations, for want of correspondence with those first principles
which belong to the imagination, do not tend, as they have in
modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and
want. They have exemplified the saying, 'To him that hath, more
shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath
shall be taken away.' The rich have become richer, and the poor
have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between
the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the
effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the
calculating faculty.
It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the
definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an
inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature,
the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures
of the superior portions of our being.
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