Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/231

HEDONISM AMONG IDEALISTS. 217 original magnitude should subsist ideally, and be traceable by arithemetical laws in the result of the deliberation. But what happens in every deliberation upon serious mat- ters is not in the least like this. The primd facie magnitudes of pleasures and pains change their amount or their sign with the combinations in which they are considered, because of the way in which those combinations alter the direction of our interests and our wants. Interest, satisfaction, expected pleasure, are not constant magnitudes attaching to particular acts or objects, but are determined by the whole fabric of purposes and satisfactions which life presents before us from moment to moment. Now it is the essence of deliberation to change this presentation by readjusting the emphasis of its outlines, completing some and obscuring others. In this process some things which fell primd facie in a main line of interest are shown not really to be so. Other things, not at- tended to at first, take the place of the former and promise a satisfaction which they cease to offer. A man is reading an ordinary novel with enjoyment. A newspaper comes in with exciting intelligence ; perhaps with the continuation of a controversy in which he is profoundly interested. He does not subtract the enjoyment of going on with his novel from the greater enjoyment of reading and discussing his newspaper, and turn to the second in virtue of the surplus of pleasure to be gained by doing so. The momentary adjust- ment of his interests is modified. The novel, for the time, has ceased to please. Our interest, as we say, is called away. This, is not an effect of relations of magnitude. It is an effect of the peculiar bearings of the various objects of life upon one another, according to the shape which our plan of satisfaction is able to adopt at the moment. Kelations of magnitude, as we said before with reference to the assignment of marks, are the effect, but not the cause. It is as if one thing were not merely outweighed by another, but lost its weight in a certain comparison, or as a colour which is pleasant in one combina- tion becomes painful in another. The new fact is not, or at least need not be, pain of discord less pleasure of colour, leaving overplus of pain of discord. The colour is now 'differently seen, and now seen as painful throughout. And deliberation just means readjusting the combinations in which things are seen. The object itself is altered. There is not a persistent Hedonic effect which is overbalanced. It might be objected that these consequences cannot be lawless or irrational, and that if we knew the actual nature of the interests concerned we could, theoretically, deduce or derive their bearing on each others' Hedonic effects from