It is no doubt a sweet and agreeable medicine: this very agreeableness
makes its medical virtue. It is a sweet antidote to the bitterness of
life. But though a man may live by medicine, he does not live for it.
So no man by rights lives for pleasure. The pleasure that a man finds
in his work encourages him to go on with it. The pleasure that a man
finds by turning aside to what is not work, picks him up, rests and
renovates him, that he may go forth as from a wayside inn, or
_diverticulum_, refreshed to resume the road of labour. Hence we
gather the solution of the question as to the lawfulness of acting for
pleasure. If a man does a thing because it is pleasant, and takes the
pleasure as an incentive to carry on his labour, or as a remedy to
enable him to resume it, he acts for pleasure rightly. For this it is
not necessary that he should expressly think of the pleasure as being
helpful to labour: it is enough that he accepts the subordination of
pleasure to work as nature has ordained it; and this ordinance he does
accept, if he puts forth no positive volition the other way, whether
expressly, as none but a wrong-headed theologian is likely to do, or
virtually, by taking his pleasure with such greediness that the motion
of his will is all spent therein as in its last end and terminus, so
that the pleasure ceases to be referable to aught beyond itself, a
case of much easier occurrence.
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