Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/237

 HEDONISM AMONG IDEALISTS. 223 basis is, I suggest, to maintain a true conviction on the wrong grounds. I believe that common instinct is right and that, so far as true quantitative estimates can be carried, the peculiar experiences which I have called the "easy" pleasures will always have an advantage in choice from the facility and obvious intensity which so easily turn them into temptations. I do not believe that the main difficulty of ethics and aesthetics can be disposed of in this way by simply ignor- ing it. We must admit, I am inclined to hold, at least a possibility that greater quantity of pleasure, so far as the phrase has a meaning, might often go with the less complete satisfaction. All satisfaction must be pleasurable ; but it is a misinterpretation of the appearances to say that the fuller satisfaction is the more pleasurable. 1 It is conceivable that pleasure should be a concomitant of satisfaction which I take to be synonymous with happiness without being pro- portional to it. A relation of this kind seems not impossible. It would involve the presence, in quantitative pleasure par excellence, of some element which in the higher satisfactions was present in a less degree, either absolutely or relatively. Violence of sensation, perhaps, is an example of such an element in the case of aesthetic enjoyment. What can be meant by a fuller satisfaction which is not necessarily a greater pleasure ? What I have in mind is such a difference as that between great art and literature, on the one hand, and " popular " art and literature on the other, or in ethics, between a serious and responsible undertaking and any kind of sport or amusement. The general theory of the contrast must be, I presume, that the former evokes our nature more nearly as a whole, and the latter more partially. But these phrases, " as a whole " and " partially," are decep- tive when applied to an organised system, because in such a system the whole is not necessarily more in every dimension than the part. It is possible for the more total satisfaction to be preferred though possessing less violence or facility of feeling, because the logic of the desires works towards remov- ing contradictions between their objects as much as possible. But intensity and facility of enjoyment may remain on the side of the partial excitement. And if intensity of absorption 1 The tendency to assert any superiority in the form of a quantity of the nearest measurable element is so enormously strong that we cannot be surprised at the difficulty which the very greatest thinkers have in resisting it. Plato's famous argument, Rep. ix., is brought to a numer- ical result, though, as I hold, by this very fact he shows that he makes light of the quantitative shape.