such simple choices as that
between thick soup and clear, then perhaps its rules might be fairly
summed up in the utilitarian formula. But in fact, as everyone knows,
the choices are far more difficult; they are between, let us say, a
bottle of port and a Beethoven symphony; leisure and liberty now, or
L1000 a-year twenty years hence; art and fame at the cost of health,
or sound nerves and obscurity; and so on, and so on through all
the possible cases, infinitely more complex in reality than I could
attempt to indicate here, all of which, no doubt, could be brought
under your formula, but none of which the formula would help to
solve."

"Of course," said Parry, "the hedonistic calculus is difficult to
apply. No one, that I know of, denies that."

"No one could very well deny it," I replied. "But now, see what
follows. Granting, for the moment, for the sake of argument, that in
making these difficult choices we really do apply what you call the
hedonistic calculus--"

"Which I, for my part, altogether deny!" cried Leslie.

"Well," I resumed, "but granting it for the moment, yet the important
point is not the criterion, but the result. It is a small thing to
know in general terms (supposing even it were true that we do know it)
that what we ought to seek is a preponderance of pleasure over pain;
the whole problem is to discover, in innumerable detailed cases,
wherein precisely the preponderance consists. But this can only be
learnt, if at all, by long and difficult, and, it may be, painful
experience. We do not really know, _a priori_, what things are
pleasurable, in the extended sense which we must give to the word if
the doctrine is to be at all plausible, any more definitely than we
know what things are good. And the Utilitarians by substituting
the word Pleasure for the word Good, even if the substitution were
legitimate, have not really done much to help us in our choice."

"But," he objected, "we do at least know what Pleasure is, even if we
do not know what things are pleasurable."

"And so I might say we do know what Good is, even if we do not know
what things are good."

"But we know Pleasure by direct sensation."

"And so I might say we know Good by direct perception."

"But you cannot define Good."

"Neither can you define Pleasure. Both must be recognised by direct
experience."

"But, at any rate," he said, "there is this distinction, that in the
case of Pleasure everyone _does_ recognise it wh