The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Studies and Strowings
Ethical, Intellectual, and Spiritual Reflections in Victorian Wisdom EssaysBy Daniel G. Brinton
Length7h 45m
About this audiobook
In The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Studies and Strowings, Daniel G. Brinton examines happiness as both an ethical aspiration and a revealing index of human culture. Drawing on anthropology, psychology, history, and moral philosophy, he considers how individuals and societies define well-being, discipline desire, and reconcile personal fulfillment with communal obligation. The book's essayistic form permits Brinton to move between comparative observation and reflective meditation, combining the orderly habits of nineteenth-century scientific inquiry with the humane, literary rhetoric of the moral essay. Its intellectual context is the Victorian-era effort to interpret human progress through the developing sciences while retaining older philosophical questions concerning virtue, purpose, and the good life. A physician, ethnologist, and pioneering scholar of Indigenous American cultures, Brinton brought to the subject an unusually broad comparative perspective. His professional interest in language, custom, religion, and social development encouraged him to view happiness not as a universal formula but as an experience shaped by historical and cultural conditions. At the same time, his engagement with liberal humanism and evolutionary thought led him to ask how knowledge might enlarge human freedom and moral capacity. This book will reward readers interested in the history of anthropology, Victorian intellectual culture, and the philosophical study of happiness. It offers not merely conclusions but a method of humane inquiry: skeptical of easy formulas, attentive to cultural difference, and confident that reflection can deepen the pursuit it describes.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★ 3.6 (33)
Includes Goodreads
GenrePhilosophy
Length7 hrs 45 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateNov 24, 2023
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Concord Days (Annotated)
2PART I. Happiness as the Aim of Life.
3PART II. How Far Our Happiness Depends on Nature and Fate.
4PART III. How Far Our Happiness Depends on Ourselves.
5PART IV. How Far Our Happiness Depends on Others.
Show all chaptersShow less
6PART V. The Consolations of Affliction.
7PART I.
8I. Is a Guide to Happiness Possible? And, if Possible, is it Desirable?
9II. The Definition of Happiness.
10III. The Relative Value of Pleasures.
11IV. The Distribution of Happiness.
12V. Principles of a Self-Education for the Promotion of One’s Own Happiness.
13PART II.
14I. Our Bodily and Mental Constitutions.
15II. Our Physical Surroundings.
16III. Luck and its Laws.
17PART III.
18I. Our Occupations, those of Necessity and those of Choice.
19II. Money-making, its Laws and its Limits.
20III. The Pleasures we may Derive from our Senses.
21IV. The Pleasures we may Derive from our Emotions.
22V. The Pleasures we may Derive from the Intellect.
23VI. The Satisfaction of the Religious Sentiment.
24VII. The Cultivation of Our Individuality.
25PART IV.
26I. What Others Give Us: Safety, Liberty, Education.
27II. What we Owe Others: Morality, Duty, Benevolence.
28III. The Practice of Business and the Enjoyment of Society.
29IV. On Fellowship, Comradeship and Friendship.
30V. Love, Marriage, and the Family Relation.
31PART V.
32I. The Removal of Unhappiness.
33II. The Inseparable Connection of Pleasure and Pain.
34III. The Education of Suffering.
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