ABSTRACT
Man differs from the other higher mammals in various ways, in all of which, man being the judge, it is thought that men are superior to other animals. The differences are not much concerned with the congenital apparatus of impulse and passion. A new-born baby differs little from a new-born puppy or kitten except in being more helpless. The cycle of hunger, lamentation, rage and repletion is much the same in a human infant as in infants of other mammalian species. It is not in the raw material of passion and impulse that human beings are peculiar in the animal kingdom, but in certain broad capacities which may be grouped under two heads as those belonging to intelligence and those belonging to imagination. Both intelligence and imagination afford new outlets for the passions without changing them fundamentally. It is melancholy, and at first sight perplexing, that, although both intelligence and imagination enable men to find new means of satisfying their desires and indulging their impulses, neither has so far increased the happiness of human beings, or even enabled it to maintain the level which it had
reached when apes first became men. Consider for a moment the comparison of two typical individuals: one, a monkey in a tropical forest, swinging from branch to branch in skilful gymnastics, gathering bananas and coconuts and indulging unrestrainedly every impulse of pleasure or fury that the moment may bring; the other, an employee in a city firm, living in a dismal suburb, waked by an alarm clock long before he has any impulse to leave his bed, breakfasting hastily, harassed throughout the day by fear of the displeasure of superiors, and returning wearily in the evening to familiar monotony. Can you honestly maintain that the man is happier than the monkey? And yet the man in question is much happier than the majority of the human race. He is not subjected to alien domination, he is not a slave, a prisoner, a member of a forced-labour camp, or a peasant in time of famine. In view of all these considerations, it cannot be said that man has used his intelligence and imagination as wisely as he is apt to think. There is a human happiness, as opposed to that of other animals, of which human beings are capable and which some human beings achieve. It would be completely useless to attempt to revert to purely animal happiness, for animal happiness is punctuated by disaster in the way of starvation or sudden death, and to human beings, with their power of thought, a life exposed to such hazards cannot be a happy one. But the happiness which is distinctive of man, though now rare, could be nearly universal. The things that make human life miserable are preventable, and the ways of preventing them are known. Why, then, are these ways not adopted? The answer to this question is tragic and complicated. The following chapters will be concerned to set it forth.
