ould it be hard, in that case, to point out what
superstition, what fantastic obsession, or what private fury, had made
those persons blind to prudence and kindness in so plain a matter.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence
remains a mad and lamentable experiment. The question, however, what
happiness shall consist in, its complexion if it should once arise, can
only be determined by reference to natural demands and capacities; so
that while satisfaction by the attainment of ends can alone justify
their pursuit, this pursuit itself must exist first and be spontaneous,
thereby fixing the goals of endeavour and distinguishing the states in
which satisfaction might be found. Natural disposition, therefore, is
the principle of preference and makes morality and happiness possible.

[Sidenote: The will must judge.]

The standard of value, like every standard, must be one. Pleasures and
pains are not only infinitely diverse but, even if reduced to their
total bulk and abstract opposition, they remain two. Their values must
be compared, and obviously neither one can be the standard by which to
judge the other. This standard is an ideal involved in the judgment
passed, whatever that judgment may be. Thus when Petrarch says that a
thousand pleasures are not worth one pain, he establishes an ideal of
value deeper than either pleasure or pain, an ideal which makes a life
of satisfaction marred by a single pang an offence and a horror to his
soul. If our demand for rationality is less acute and the miscellaneous
affirmations of the will carry us along with a well-fed indifference to
some single tragedy within us, we may aver that a single pang is only
the thousandth part of a thousand pleasures and that a life so balanced
is nine hundred and ninety-nine times better than nothing. This
judgment, for all its air of mathematical calculation, in truth
expresses a choice as irrational as Petrarch's. It merely means that, as
a matter of fact, the mixed prospect presented to us attracts our wills
and attracts them vehemently. So that the only possible criterion for
the relative values of pains and pleasures is the will that chooses
among them or among combinations of them; nor can the intensity of
pleasures and pains, apart from the physical violence of their
expression, be judged by any other standard than by the power they have,
when represented, to control the will's movement.

[Sidenote: Injustice