If these capacities be great, we shall be eager in our desire to gratify them--certainly for ourselves, and perhaps also for others; and this second desire may perhaps be great enough to modify and to guide the first.

But unless these capacities _be_ great, and the means of gratifying them definite, our impulses on our own behalf will become weak and sluggish, whilst those on behalf of others will become less able to control them.
It will be apparent farther from this, that just as happiness, unless some distinct positive quality, gains nothing as an end of action, either in value or distinctness, by a mere diffusion in the present--by an extension, as it were, laterally--so will it gain nothing further by giving it another dimension, and by prospectively increasing it in the future.

We must know what it is first, before we know whether it is capable of increase.

Apart from this knowledge, the conception of progress and the hope of some brighter destiny can add nothing to that required _something_, which, so far as sociology can define it for us, we have seen to be so utterly inadequate.

Social conditions, it is true, we may expect will go on improving; we may hope that the social machinery will come gradually to run more smoothly.