It has
no power of summing up its feelings. Hence its careless and placid
temper: how much it is to be envied! But in man reflection comes in,
with all the emotions to which it gives rise; and taking up the same
elements of pleasure and pain which are common to him and the brute,
it develops his susceptibility to happiness and misery to such a
degree that, at one moment the man is brought in an instant to a state
of delight that may even prove fatal, at another to the depths of
despair and suicide.
If we carry our analysis a step farther, we shall find that, in order
to increase his pleasures, man has intentionally added to the number
and pressure of his needs, which in their original state were not much
more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all
its forms; delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous
liquors, fine clothes, and the thousand and one things than he
considers necessary to his existence.
And above and beyond all this, there is a separate and peculiar source
of pleasure, and consequently of pain, which man has established for
himself, also as the result of using his powers of reflection; and
this occupies him out of all proportion to its value, nay, almost more
than all his other interests put together--I mean ambition and the
feeling of honor and shame; in plain words, what he thinks about the
opinion other people have of him.
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