Bradley's hostility to pleasure was not fanatical: one's station and its
duties might have their agreeable side. "It is probably good for you", he
tells us, "to have, say, not less than two glasses of wine after dinner.
Six on ordinary occasions is perhaps too many; but as to three or four,
they are neither one way nor the other." If the voluptuary was condemned,
it was for the commonplace reason which a hedonist, too, might invoke,
that a life of pleasure soon palls and becomes unpleasant. Bradley's
objection to pleasure was merely speculative: he found it too "abstract".
To call a pleasure when actually felt an abstraction is an exquisite
absurdity: but pleasure, in its absolute essence, is certainly simple and
indefinable. If instead of enjoying it on the wing, and as an earnest of
the soul's momentary harmony, we attempt to arrest and observe it, we find
it strangely dumb; we are not informed by it concerning its occasion, nor
carried from it by any logical implication to the natural object in which
it might be found. A pure hedonist ought therefore to be rather relieved
if all images lapsed from his consciousness and he could luxuriate in
sheer pleasure, dark and overwhelming. True, such bliss would be rather
inhuman, and of the sort which we rashly assign to the oyster: but why
should a radical and intrepid philosopher be ashamed of that? The
condition of Bradley's Absolute--feeling in which all distinctions are
transcended and merged--seems to be something of that kind; but there
would be a strange irony in attributing this mystical and rapturous ideal
to such ponderous worthies as Mill and Spencer, whose minds were nothing
if not anxious, perturbed, instrumental, and full of respect for
variegated facts, and who were probably incapable of tasting pure pleasure
at all.
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