Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/238

 224 BERNARD BOSANQUET : HEDONISM AMONG IDEALISTS. seems in a sense to be rather on the side of the great tragedy or grave enterprise, still this intensity, stirring up all the paradoxes of our being from its foundations, need not be primd facie an intensity of pleasure. There is also the point that any one who does not know pain has plainly omitted a great range of experience. It must surely be in some sense included in a complete satisfaction. No doubt there is a tendency for elements which appear to be sacrificed in the intermediate grades of perfection to be restored as perfection is approached. What is a loss, and how far perfection can involve what to us would seem a " loss," is a most difficult problem, both in metaphysic and in such sciences as aesthetic. But it seems clear, as indeed the author's theory most emphatically demands, that we cannot exclude all transformation of common experience in the higher grades of perfection on the ground that it would involve a loss. And if so if for example the world of sensa- tion must be sacrificed in ultimate reality there can be no general reason why intensity or quantity of pleasure should persist in such a way as to merit the names we give them. It seems to follow that in some form or degree, after all has been said that can be said for the unity of body and mind, it will be necessary to rehabilitate the distinction between bodily or relatively partial, and spiritual or relatively total, satisfactions. A pleasure in which the bodily system as such is harmoniously excited, as in a game or sport at its best, must be fundamentally different from a far-reaching emotion in which the body is but secondarily aroused, as in reflexion on the triumph of a great moral or political cause. If it were possible that pleasure, in the direct and simple sense, could be proved proportional to the participation of the body in any activity, and not to the range of objective harmony signified to the intelligence through its activity (e.g. through a certain group of judgments or perceptions) we should have a theory which would come near to fitting the facts of introspection and of ethical and aesthetic analysis. Pleasure would then be a concomitant of satisfaction, but not simply proportional to it. The equivalent of pleasure in ultimate reality would not be annihilated by such a doctrine, for the body and all its feelings plainly must be represented there. (To be continued.)