no chorus of contradiction ringing through all
the spheres can ever wholly abolish. An experience good or bad in itself
remains so for ever, and its inclusion in a more general order of things
can only change that totality proportionately to the ingredient
absorbed, which will infect the mass, so far as it goes, with its own
colour. The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being
equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more
pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign is its total
temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for
there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to
superstition; and candour and a sense of justice are, in such a case,
the first things lost.

[Sidenote: but not pursued or remembered unless it suffuses an object.]

Pleasures differ sensibly in intensity; but the intensest pleasures are
often the blindest, and it is hard to recall or estimate a feeling with
which no definite and complex object is conjoined. The first step in
making pleasure intelligible and capable of being pursued is to make it
pleasure in something. The object it suffuses acquires a value, and
gives the pleasure itself a place in rational life. The pleasure can now
be named, its variations studied in reference to changes in its object,
and its comings and goings foreseen in the order of events. The more
articulate the world that produces emotion the more controllable and
recoverable is the emotion itself. Therefore diversity and order in
ideas makes the life of pleasure richer and easier to lead. A voluminous
dumb pleasure might indeed outweigh the pleasure spread thin over a
multitude of tame perceptions, if we could only weigh the two in one
scale; but to do so is impossible, and in memory and prospect, if not in
experience, diversified pleasure must needs carry the day.

[Sidenote: Subhuman delights.]

Here we come upon a crisis in human development which shows clearly how
much the Life of Reason is a natural thing, a growth that a different
course of events might well have excluded. Laplace is reported to have
said on his death-bed that science was mere trifling and that nothing
was real but love. Love, for such a man, doubtless involved objects and
ideas: it was love of persons. The same revulsion of feeling may,
however, be carried further. Lucretius says that passion is a torment
because its pleasures are not pure, that is, be