Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/388

374 HASTINGS RASHDALL: decided on which side the balance lies, we usually stop, because when we have determined that we are going to prefer A's entertainment to B's, no purpose is served by attempting to estimate or to express the degree of our preference. As a general rule there would be no use in such an attempt, but it is possible with a little ingenuity to imagine circumstances in which it would be of use. If a prize were offered to the host who would give us most pleasure in the course of six entertainments with or without a certain limit to the expense, the judges in such a compe- tition would, I imagine, have to record their impressions of each entertainment in some such way very much as a man who is judging prize poems might quite intelligibly (though I do not recommend the method) arrive at his decision by assigning so many marks for language, so many for ideas, so many for rhythm, and so on. To avoid an irrelevant objection I admit at once that it is very rarely and only in regard to the choice of mere amusements and not always then that we do make our conduct depend upon such purely hedonistic calculations, unmodified by other considerations. I may add that, if there seems to be something rather tasteless and repellent about the analy- sis of these hedonistic calculations for ourselves, we have constantly to make them for others. A man who has determined to provide a school treat for a number of children, and to devote thereto a definite sum of money, aims, I suppose, at producing a maximum of pleasure; though I have heard a Moral Philosopher of some re- pute gravely express a doubt as to whether the good-will could ever express itself by giving pleasure to others. , The giver of such a treat knows that, if he provides fireworks, he must cut down the prizes for races, that if he gives the children a better class of cake he will not be able to give them sweets too, and so on. If it helped him (and it is quite possible that it would help an old schoolmaster) to express the value of the pleasure which, each shilling expended in different ways would buy by assigning marks to each item and then totting them up, I do not see that there would be anything essentially unmeaning or irrational about his procedure. No doubt in such cases our estimates are exceedingly rough, but that does not make it actually impossible to express our judgment in numbers. It is far easier to say that one flock of sheep is bigger than another than to say by how many it is bigger, but that does not alter the fact that if one flock is bigger than another, it is because it contains more sheep.