Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/229

HEDONISM AMONG IDEALISTS. 215 and C together. Thus it seems to follow that the diffi- culty which is practically found in equating them is merely analogous to the liability to error attaching to all quantitative judgment whatever. And so there comes out the result that pleasure is as good a quantity as feet and inches, only rather harder to judge of in practice. But this seems to me to presuppose the point at issue. It is clear that pleasure, so far as quantitative, is intensive, but the question is how far it is quantitative. Intensity, it may be agreed, involves the idea of a more or less of the same ; but there are plenty of perceptions of more or less for which no measurement by a constant unit, and therefore no true quantity, has been or apparently can be established. 1 It is a matter of words whether we call such perceptions quantitative. But it seems clear that if they are quantitative, it is in a sense which does not involve numerical relations. To judge that A = B + C, is beyond the mere perception of more and less, which involves neither a judgment of equality, nor an analysis of one term into two definite quantities. But it is short of numerical comparison, which surely must be taken to demand a total of units on one side of the equation at least. Thus I do not find the difficulty where the author finds it. I do not see that "intensive" is a ground of objection, if " quantity " could be proved applicable. But to refute an objection based on "intensive" is, to my mind, in no way to establish the proof of " quantity ". That must be independently sustained. The possibility of establishing anything like a true unit for amounts of pleasures and pains, even supposing the two could form part of the same quantita- tive series, is a psychological problem which I do not feel competent to discuss. It would seem necessary first to show not merely that all pleasure and pain is homogeneous qua pleasure and pain, i.e., distinct from other elements of feeling and content (which was admitted provisionally on sect. 112), but that it is capable in itself of being represented by degrees of a single series, i.e., has only one dimension,' 2 so to speak. And then it would be necessary to show that the degrees of this series were true units, such that a number of them might be taken as a true multiple of one. Con- sidering, e.g., the peculiarities of the sensation differences l l should say that the intensive and extensive aspects are both of them necessary to qiiantity in the strict sense. But without raising this difficulty, it seems plain that numerical comparison cannot be had with- out the establishment of a constant unit. 2 Mr. Taylor has pressed this point upon me in conversation.