The stage is instrumental to the happiness of mankind in general. And here it will be necessary to declare what is meant by happiness, and to proceed upon that.
By happiness, then, I never could understand any thing else but pleasure; for I never could have any notion of happiness that did not agree with pleasure, or any notion of pleasure that did not agree with happiness. I could never possibly conceive how anyone can be happy without being pleased, or pleased without being happy. 'Tis universally acknowledged by mankind that happiness consists in pleasure, which is evident from this, that whatever a man does, whether in spiritual or temporal affairs, whether in matters of profit or diversion, pleasure is, at least, the chief and the final motive to it, if it is not the immediate one. And Providence seems to have sufficiently declared that pleasure was intended for our spring and fountain of action when it made it the incentive to those very acts by which we propagate our kind and preserve ourselves. As if selflove without pleasure were insufficient for either; for, as I myself have known several who have chosen rather to die than to go through tedious courses of physic, so, I make no doubt, but several would have taken the same resolution rather than have supported life by a perpetual course of eating, which had differed in nothing from a course of physic if eating and pleasure had not been things inseparable. Now as it is pleasure that obliges man to preserve himself, it is the very same that has sometimes the force to prevail upon him to his own destruction. For, as Monsieur Pascal observes, the very men who hang and who drown themselves are instigated by the secret pleasure which they have from the thought that they shall be freed from pain.
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