be separated from the other; and these are _ennui_
and _pleasure_. Ennui is an afflicting sensation, if we may thus express
it, from a want of sensation; and pleasure is greater pleasure according
to the quantity of sensation. That sensation is received in proportion to
the capacity of our organs; and that practice, or, as it has been
sometimes called, "educated feeling," enlarges this capacity, is evident
in such familiar instances as those of the blind, who have a finer tact,
and the jeweller, who has a finer sight, than other men who are not so
deeply interested in refining their vision and their touch. Intense
attention is, therefore, a certain means of deriving more numerous
pleasures from its object.

Hence it is that the poet, long employed on a poem, has received a
quantity of pleasure which no reader can ever feel. In the progress of any
particular pursuit, there are a hundred fugitive sensations which are too
intellectual to be embodied into language. Every artist knows that between
the thought that first gave rise to his design, and each one which appears
in it, there are innumerable intermediate evanescences of sensation which
no man felt but himself. These pleasures are in number according to the
intenseness of his faculties and the quantity of his labour.

It is so in any particular pursuit, from the manufacturing of pins to the
construction of philosophical systems. Every individual can exert that
quantity of mind necessary to his wants and adapted to his situation; the
quality of pleasure is nothing in the present question: for I think that
we are mistaken concerning the gradations of human felicity. It does at
first appear, that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a
star, must feel a more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting
his team; or a poet experience a higher gratification in modulating verses
than a trader in arranging sums. But the happiness of the ploughman and
the trader may be as satisfactory as that of the astronomer and the poet.
Our mind can only he conversant with those sensations which surround us,
and possessing the skill of managing them, we can form an artificial
felicity; it is certain that what the soul does not feel, no more affects
it than what the eye does not see. It is thus that the trader, habituated
to humble pursuits, can never be unhappy because he is not the general of
an army; for this idea of felicity he has never received. The philosopher
w