Questions of our day / Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
[1936]
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Questions of our day / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    I THE QUESTION OF HAPPINESS I AM a young man of twenty-one, intensely interested in the enigma of human betterment, in so far as it is in the individual's power to guide his own life to the highest pinnacle of success. What is the end to strive for? It seems to me that the answer is Happiness. If you agree with me, what do you mean by Happiness, and how do you go about attaining it? If I try to answer the question for myself I can only say that Happiness is successful self-preservation in the full sense of the term. This correspondent, otherwise unknown to me, writes from New York, and, without knowing it, he raises a question which at the time he wrote I chanced to be discussing. It is evidently a question which concerns many, and my corres¬ pondent approaches it from a side so different from that I adopted that it may be worth while to consider it afresh. No doubt it may be admitted that hap, or luck, bestowing a life that is all joy and vouchsafing the satisfaction of all desires, would be a miracle that, even if possible, would scarcely be desirable. Happiness, as George Eliot said, is considered a well-fleshed indifference to sorrow outside it. But still—as at the back of my mind I was well aware— when people talk of Happiness they mean something vaguer and more varied than can be defined in the dictionary. That is where my correspondent comes in. There are, he says, fifty-seven varieties of living, each exerting an attractive or repulsive force. Which way of living to choose? I в