ABSTRACT
In the framework of the usual division of normal mental states into pleasurable and unpleasurable, all positively colored feelings can be classified together. The feeling of happiness that the people are proposing to consider must be connected with the whole personality and assumes the harmonious cooperation of all the components of the ego, which at any rate in this actual experience must function as a well organized whole. Of the numerous, very different forms taken by the latter the author shall refer only to religious ecstasy as described to the reader in the numerous confessions of ecstatics. It is a consequence of biological laws that every form of attaining satisfaction is given up for a new one when it can no longer satisfy new aspirations for pleasure. Thus the sense of happiness, which the people have defined as a sense of unity and expansion in the ego, is thoroughly narcissistic.
