Mind from its object differs most in this:
Evil from good; misery from happiness;
The baser from the nobler; the impure
And frail, from what is clear and must endure.
If you divide suffering and dross, you may
Diminish till it is consumed away;
If you divide pleasure and love and thought,
Each part exceeds the whole; and we know not
How much, while any yet remains unshared,
Of pleasure may be gained, of sorrow spared:
This truth is that deep well, whence sages draw
The unenvied light of hope; the eternal law
By which those live, to whom this world of life
Is as a garden ravaged, and whose strife
Tills for the promise of a later birth
The wilderness of this Elysian earth.
-- Shelley, Epipsychidion
Or, as a New York Times article summarizes it, "How happy you are may depend on how happy your friends’ friends’ friends are, even if you don’t know them at all." One of the dissenters in that article argues that happiness is "the epitome of an individualistic state" -- well, that was someone from the University of Chicago, which (on the whole) is devoted to things more envied than is the 'light of hope'. A bit passé of them, though.
Nation, 's latest, is on Shelley's side.
So wrote clew in Philosophy.