Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/389

CAN THERE BE A SUM OF PLEASURES? 375 Our estimate is none the less quantitative because it is vague. 1 But I have not yet done justice to Prof. Mackenzie's strongest argument. He tells us that the proposition " this is twice as pleasant as that," is as unmeaning as the judgment " this is twice as hot as that". Now I admit fully that in the case of sensible heat or of any other sensations which admit of being arranged in a scale, quantitative measurement is essentially impossible. But I contend that pleasure does not belong to this category at all, and I will try to show why. The reason why it is impossible to express degrees of sensible heat quantitatively is that there is no equivalence between the difference between any two degrees of sensible heat and the difference between any two other degrees. Let the line A Z represent the various A B C D E F . Z. possible degrees of sensible heat ranging from a coldest A to a hottest Z (of course I do not attempt to answer the physio- logical question whether there is a minimum or maximum of possible sensible heat). The reason why I cannot mark off this line into degrees to which I might assign numbers like the numbers which express the degrees of physical heat on a thermometer is that I cannot say that D is as much hotter than C as Y is hotter than X. But in comparing pleasures I have no difficulty in doing this. If I would as soon have pleasure X raised to Y as pleasure C (lower down on the scale) raised to D, then I can intelligibly say that the difference between X and Y is equivalent to the difference between C and D. To take a concrete case : if a bank clerk is offered an addition of 50 a year to his salary or a diminu- tion of his day's work by half an hour, and were, after consideration, conducted wholly on hedonistic grounds, to say " I really don't care," we should be entitled to say that the pleasures which he would obtain by the expenditure of 50 made up of course by an addition of the pleasure derived from so much better eating and drinking, so many more nights at the theatre, or from so many more books and a more enjoyable summer holiday was the equivalent of the enjoyment which he would derive from 280 half-hours' leisure. It may be said that after all we have here only quantitative equality, not numerically defined inequality. But then I should proceed to argue that the enjoyment of 1 Mr. Bpsanquet has attempted to show that such judgment may be only qualitative, but he is thinking of the unreflecting and unanalysed judgments of savages, and even so he is not convincing.