the bringing together of two neutrals can produce the Good?

    They will explain, possibly, that the state must be a state of
Good and that such a condition constitutes well-being on the
discernment of that present good; but then they invite the question
whether the well-being comes by discerning the presence of the Good
that is there, or whether there must further be the double recognition
that the state is agreeable and that the agreeable state constitutes
the Good.

    If well-being demands this recognition, it depends no longer
upon sensation but upon another, a higher faculty; and well-being is
vested not in a faculty receptive of pleasure but in one competent
to discern that pleasure is the Good.

    Then the cause of the well-being is no longer pleasure but the
faculty competent to pronounce as to pleasure's value. Now a judging
entity is nobler than one that merely accepts a state: it is a
principle of Reason or of Intellection: pleasure is a state: the
reasonless can never be closer to the Good than reason is. How can
reason abdicate and declare nearer to good than itself something lying
in a contrary order?

    No: those denying the good of life to the vegetable world, and
those that make it consist in some precise quality of sensation, are
in reality seeking a loftier well-being than they are aware of, and
setting their highest in a more luminous phase of life.

    Perhaps, then, those are in the right who found happiness not on
the bare living or even on sensitive life but on the life of Reason?

    But they must tell us it should be thus restricted and why
precisely they make Reason an essential to the happiness in a living
being:

    "When you insist on Reason, is it because Reason is resourceful,
swift to discern and compass the primal needs of nature; or would
you demand it, even though it were powerless in that domain?"

    If you call it in as a provider, then the reasonless, equally with
the reasoning, may possess happiness after their kind, as long as,
without any thought of theirs, nature supplies their wants: Reason
becomes a servant; there is no longer any worth in it for itself and
no worth in that consummation of reason which, we hold, is virtue.

    If you say that reason is to be cherished for its own sake and not
as supplying these human needs, you must tell us what other services
it renders, what is its proper nature and what makes it the perfect
thing it is.

    For, on this admission, its perfection cannot reside in any such
planning and providing: its perfection will be something quite
different, something of quite another class: Reason cannot be itself
one of those first needs of nature; it cannot even be a cause of those
first needs of nature or at all belong to that order: it must be
nobler than any and all of such things: otherwise it is not easy to
see how we can be asked to rate it so highly.

    Until these people light upon some nobler principle than any at
which they still halt, they must be left where they are and where they
choose to be, never understanding what the Good of Life is to those
that can make it theirs, never knowing to what kind of beings it is
accessible.

    What then is happiness? Let us try basing it upon Life.

    3. Now if we draw no distinction as to kinds of life, everything
that lives will be capable of happiness, and those will be effectively
happy who possess that one common gift of which every living thing
is by nature receptive. We could not deny it to the irrational
whilst allowing it to the rational. If happiness were inherent in
the bare being-alive, the common ground in which the cause of
happiness could always take root would be simply life.

    Those, then, that set happiness not in the mere living but in
the reasoning life seem to overlook the fact that they are not
really making it depend upon life at all: they admit that this
reasoning faculty, round which they centre happiness, is a property
[not the subject of a property]: the subject, to them, must be the
Reasoning-Life since it is in this double term that they find the
basis of the happiness: so that they are making it consist not in life
but in a particular kind of life- not, of course, a species formally
opposite but, in terminology, standing as an "earlier" to a "later" in
the one Kind.

    Now in common use this word "Life" embraces many forms which shade
down from primal to secondary and so on, all massed under the common
term- life of plant and life of animal- each phase brighter or
dimmer than its next: and so it evidently must be with the
Good-of-Life. And if thing is ever the image of thing, so every Good
must always be the image of a higher Good.

    If mere Being is insufficient, if happiness demands fulness of
life, and exists, therefore, where nothing is lacking of all that
belongs to the idea of life, then happiness can exist only in a
being that lives fully.

    And such a one will possess not merely the good, but the Supreme
Good if, that is to say, in the realm of existents the Supreme Good
can be no other than the authentically living, no other than Life in