Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THESIS II Man of his very nature desires complete happiness. Complete happiness is man's absolutely last end subjectively taken. This natural desire must be possible of fulfilment. No created good can secure to man complete happiness. The possession of God is alone complete happiness, and God is alone complete happiness, and God is man's absolutely last end objectively taken. Jouin, 5-19; Rickaby, 6-26. QUESTION Here on the threshold of morality a multitude of questions besets us. We know from Metaphysics that every agent, man included, works unto some end. We know, further, that man excels all other creatures in this, that he chooses his end and selects means to its accomplishment. He is not an accumulation of blind forces, working along lines mapped out for him by another. He thinks for himself, he decides for himself, he weighs, examines, approves, condemns. We have from our previous acquaintance with philosophy a fair insight into his faculties. From experience we have a fair knowledge of the motives, that clamor for his attention in the routine of everyday affairs. Some are money-makers, some are chiselling for themselves a niche in the temple of fame, some are in continual search for health or the means to preserve it, some keep busy nursing an appetite for palatable dishes, and others travel in pursuit of a good they can expect to come up with only after death. We have to range ourselves in some class. Nay, we are placed already. For the present we want to look at things with the cold, calculating eyes of reason, to profit by our own mistakes and the mistakes of others, and stand just where common sense would have us stand in life's struggles. We want to find out what craving is in reality at the bottom of human desires, and what one object in the universe can sate... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.