The Right to Happiness

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 250, 18 July 1931, Page 20

The Right to Happiness

“If anybody thinks he has a right to happiness in the shape of an uninterrupted flow of pleasant sensations, he is suffering from one of the grossest delusions that ever haunted the human mind. No human being is fitted for such an existence, either by the constitution of his body or the constitution of his mind. Merely to keep him alive as a human being, to say nothing of making his life worth living, he needs a lot of pain and a lot of difficulty, and is admirably fitted both in mind and body for dealing with both things. On any other terms he would perish miserably. , “And not only are human’ beings unfitted both in’mind and body for a life of uninterrupted pleasure,.’ but any God, or Universe, which offered them that as end-all and goal of their existence would be a God not worthy of worship and a, universe not worth living in. “It would be a universe without meaning, without value, without beauty —the silliest., and most, contemptible universe the.mind can conceive: a’ fool’s paradise; if you like, but a hell for everybody except the fools, and not much of a paradise even for them. ' “All healthy-minded men and women instinctively fee! this, and are only arguing against their deepest Instincts when. they talk otherwise, as the foolish creatures often do.”—Dr. I* P. Jacks. i