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desire is repressed; the latter that it is regulated. Content is a
judgment that, upon the whole, we cannot with our existing means
improve our position, along with an unmurmuring submission to the
hardships, if any, of that position. Its aim is, not to satisfy
desires; but to appease complaint. It is consequently not
inconsistent with the most active efforts to alter that combination
of circumstances upon which the judgment was formed. " The desire
of amelioration, it has been truly said, is not less a moral
principle than patience under afflictions; and the use of content
is not to destroy, but to regulate and direct it." 10. So far from
our wants being unworthy of our higher nature, we can readily trace
their moral function and appreciate its importance. They not only
prevent our retrogression, but secure our advancement. Our real
state of nature consists not in the repression, but in the full
development and satisfaction, of all those faculties of which our
nature consists. Such a state is found, not in the poverty of the
naked savage; but in the wealth of the civilized man. It is the
constant and powerful impulse of our varied and insatiable desires,
that urges us to avoid the one state, and to tend towards the
other. " Wants and enjoyments," says Bentham, f " these universal
agents in society, after having raised the first ears of corn, will
by degrees erect the granaries of abundance, always increasing, and
always full. Desires extend themselves with the means of
gratification; the horizon is enlarged in proportion as we advance,
and each new want, equally accompanied by its pleasure and its
pain, becomes a new principle of action. Opulence, which is only a
comparative term, does not arrest this movement when once it is
begun; on the contrary, the greater the Dr...
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