Each individual must define happiness for himself or herself. For my
part, I rule out practically all the dictionary definitions. In most
dictionaries you will find that the principal meaning attached to the
word is ‘good fortune’ or ‘prosperity.’ Which is notoriously absurd.
Then come such definitions as ‘a state of well-being characterised
by relative permanence, by dominantly agreeable emotion ... and by a
natural desire for its continuation.’ This last is from Webster, and
it is very clever. Yet I will have none of it, unless I am allowed to
define the word ‘well-being’ in my own way.
For me, an individual cannot be in a state of well-being if any of his
faculties are permanently idle through any fault of his own. The full
utilisation of all the faculties seems to me to be the foundation of
well-being. But I doubt if a full utilisation of all the faculties
necessarily involves the idea of good fortune, or prosperity, or
tranquillity, or contentedness with one’s lot, or even a ‘dominantly
agreeable emotion’; very often it rather involves the contrary.
In my view happiness includes chiefly the idea of ‘satisfaction after
full honest effort.’ Everybody is guilty of mistakes and of serious
mistakes, and the contemplation of these mistakes must darken, be it
ever so little, the last years of existence. But it need not be fatal
to a general satisfaction. Men and women may in the end be forced to
admit: ‘I made a fool of myself,’ and still be fairly happy. But no
one can possibly be satisfied, and therefore no one can in my sense be
happy, who feels that in some paramount affair he has failed to take
up the challenge of life. For a voice within him, which none else can
hear, but which he cannot choke, will constantly be murmuring:
‘You lacked courage. You hadn’t the pluck. You ran away.’
And it is happier to be unhappy in the ordinary sense all one’s life
than to have to listen at the end to that dreadful interior verdict.