“ We are not pleased by an evil; we are pleased by a vivid and exciting sensation, which is a good, but which has for objective cause an event which may indeed be an evil to others, but about the consequences of which we are not thinking at all. ”
George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (1896). copy citation
| Author | George Santayana |
|---|---|
| Source | The Sense of Beauty |
| Topic | evil consequences |
| Date | 1896 |
| Language | English |
| Reference | |
| Note | |
| Weblink | http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26842/26842-h/26842-h.htm |
Context
“but if, without caring for a loss and suffering we do not share, we are delighted by the blaze, and still say that what pleases us is an evil, we are using this word as a conventional appellation, not as the mark of a felt value. We are not pleased by an evil; we are pleased by a vivid and exciting sensation, which is a good, but which has for objective cause an event which may indeed be an evil to others, but about the consequences of which we are not thinking at all. There is, in this sense, nothing in all nature, perhaps, which is not an evil; nothing which is not unfavourable to some interest, and does not involve some infinitesimal or ultimate suffering in the universe of life.”
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