ant way, embarking upon a new
interest, entering upon the formation of a new habit or upon a new
accession of power or effectiveness--making or seeking to make, in
short, some transformation in his environment and in himself that shall
give his life as an entire system a changed tenor and perspective. The
term "constructive comparison" is thus intended, among other things, to
suggest that the process is in the nature of adventure, not calculation,
and, on the other hand, that though adventurous it is not sheer hazard
uncontrolled. And the motive dominant throughout the process--the
economic motive in its constructive phase--is neither more nor less than
a supposition, on the agent's part, that there may be forthcoming for
him in the given case in hand just such an "epigenetic" development of
new significance and value as we have found actual history to disclose
as a normal result of economic innovation. It is the gist of hedonism,
in economic theory as in its other expressions, that inevitably the
agent's interests and motives are restricted in every case to the
precise range and scope of his existing tendencies and desires; he can
be provoked to act only by the hope of just those particular future
pleasures or means of pleasure which the present constitution of his
nature enables him to enjoy. Idealism assumes that the emergent new
interest of the present was wrapped up or "implied," in some sense, in
the interests of the remote and immediate past--interests of which the
agent at the time could of course be but "imperfectly" aware. Such
differences as one can discern between the two interpretations seem
small indeed--like many others to which idealism has been wont to point
in disparagement of the hedonistic world view. For in both philosophies
the agent is without initiative and effect; he is in principle but the
convergence of impersonal motive powers which it is, in the one view,
absurdly futile, in the other misguidedly presumptuous, to try to alter
or control.

Sec. 9. A commodity sought or encountered may then be of interest to us for
reasons of the following three general sorts. In the first place it may
simply be the normal and appropriate object of some established desire
of ours. We may be seeking the commodity because this desire has first
become active, or encountering the commodity in the market may have
suddenly awakened the desire. Illustration seems superfluous; tobacco
for the habitual smoker, clothing