 Regardless of whether or not Shaftesbury is accurately characterized as egoistic, he clearly does contend that virtue conduces to one’s happiness and vice to one’s misery—that “Virtue and Interest may be found at last to agree” (C 2.16). And he develops a psychological explanation for this agreement. Central to this explanation is his distinction between pleasures of the body and pleasures of the mind. Shaftesbury argues that a person’s happiness depends more on mental pleasures than on bodily pleasures. He then seeks to show that living virtuously is by far the best way to gain the crucially important mental pleasures (C 2.47–73). Shaftesbury bases much of his argument for the connection between virtue and happiness on the idea that the mental pleasures are within one’s own control, insulated from the vicissitudes of “Fortune, Age, Circumstances, and Humour” (C 2.434). As one of Shaftesbury’s characters rhetorically asks,