ABSTRACT

Locke brings us perceptibly nearer to our own day by his conceptions of industry and society as well as by his general philosophy, on which the philosophy of the 18th century was founded. His conception of wealth may be gathered from his view of happiness-happiness depending on pleasure and pain as “the hinges on which our passions turn.”1 Man is placed in the world to procure “the happiness which this world is capable of, which is nothing else but plenty of all sorts of those things which can, with most ease, pleasure and variety, preserve him longest in it.”2 Pleasure and pain are “simple ideas”; that is to say, they are an immediate datum of experience. “Good” means what increases pleasure or diminishes pain; evil, what does the opposite. But pain rather than pleasure is described as the real cause of desire and therewith of action.3