When Bentham said that the highest good is pleasure, and the way to create an ethics, morality, and social structure is to promote pleasurable things that will keep people warm, fed, clothed and happy, thus preventing wars and death. There is no concept of developing the self, or striving for higher things, because the world is only physical. John Stuart Mill takes evolves this further: he admits to a realm of imagination, which is the reason that religion and poetry are useful. This is not the ideal outlet, however. In Utility of Religion, Mill claims that the best route to happiness is to be able to accept and be content with the fact that all we have is this physical existence, and, since pleasure is the highest good, we should take care to fill each moment with pleasure so that we will have nothing to regret or wish for at the end of life. A moment filled with pleasure, he says, is never wasted, and a life filled with pleasurable moments is the highest good we could possibly desire.
Where does this leave poesy, then?
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