ich they contained we do not
even seek to remember or to discriminate. The period is called happy or
unhappy merely as its ideal representation exercises fascination or
repulsion over the present will. Hence the revulsion after physical
indulgence, often most violent when the pleasure--judged by its
concomitant expression and by the desire that heralded it--was most
intense. For the strongest passions are intermittent, so that the
unspeakable charm which their objects possess for a moment is lost
immediately and becomes unintelligible to a chilled and cheated
reflection. The situation, when yet unrealised, irresistibly solicited
the will and seemed to promise incomparable ecstasy; and perhaps it
yields an indescribable moment of excitement and triumph--a moment only
half-appropriated into waking experience, so fleeting is it, and so
unfit the mind to possess or retain its tenser attitudes. The same
situation, if revived in memory when the system is in an opposite and
relaxed state, forfeits all power to attract and fills the mind rather
with aversion and disgust. For all violent pleasures, as Shakespeare
says, are cruel and not to be trusted.

A bliss in proof and, proved, a very woe:
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream ...
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted and, no sooner had,
Past reason hated.

[Sidenote: Methods of control.]

Past reason, indeed. For although an impulsive injustice is inherent in
the very nature of representation and cannot be overcome altogether, yet
reason, by attending to all the evidences that can be gathered and by
confronting the first pronouncement by others fetched from every quarter
of experience, has power to minimise the error and reach a practically
just estimate of absent values. This achieved rightness can be tested by
comparing two experiences, each when it is present, with the same
conventional permanent object chosen to be their expression. A
love-song, for instance, can be pronounced adequate or false by various
lovers; and it can thus remain a sort of index to the fleeting
sentiments once confronted with it. Reason has, to be sure, no
independent method of discovering values. They must be rated as the
sensitive balance of present inclination, when completely laden, shows
them to stand. In estimating values reason is reduced to data furnished
by the mechanical processes of ideation and instinct, as in framing all
knowledge; an a