Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/227

HEDONISM AMONG IDEALISTS. 213 When we come to anything so serious and demanding so much precision as weighing something important to oneself against something affecting a number of others, but probably much less important to each of them, I feel sure that we do not proceed by balancing a single intense feeling against a sum or indeed a product of weaker feelings. To multiply a weaker feeling by twenty or thirty, not to say a thousand or a million, and set the product against a single intense feeling, is, I am sure, something which we cannot even attempt, though the questions in which the use of a Hedonic criterion would require it to be done are of everyday occur- rence. Our decisions in cases of this kind must rest, I think, on the acceptance of some hierarchy among the activities of life, and an opinion as to which of them will be most hindered by our conduct under the circumstances. It is to be borne in mind that taking perfection as our criterion we are not barred from recognising pleasure as an evidence, when no better can be obtained, of certain elements in it, because we are working with a comprehensive idea of satisfaction ; while adopting a Hedonic criterion, on the very ground that it can be applied with precision while degrees of perfection are unknowable, we are barred from supplementing it by any other tests of satisfaction. Indeed, one cannot help feeling that in some respects the Hedonic criterion brings us back to the standpoint of Psy- chological Hedonism. It is much, no doubt, to have broken the circle of Egoism. But still, though the abandonment of Psychological Hedonism involves the position that our main desires are for objects which satisfy, and not for pleasures, the Hedonic criterion debars us from using directly the character of satisfactory objects as such for a test of what is likely to satisfy. I shall return to this point in dealing with the correctness of the Hedonic criterion. One word on the argument (sect. 117) that morality itself requires us to choose, ceteris paribus, pleasure rather than pain, and to a.im at giving pleasure to others a requirement which cannot be fulfilled without calculation of pleasures and pains. I reply in substance by pointing to the result which we drew above from the comparison of pleasure, as a measurable aspect of action, to the exchange value of com- modities. In strictness it followed that all equal amounts of pleasure, however compounded, were ethically interchange- able. I do not believe that the moral consciousness endorses the alleged moral requirement, as it would have to be construed in face of this strict interpretation of amount of pleasure.