GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

410 . ETHICS
you have, the more of them you will want, and (ii) that
you will find it ever more difficult to obtain that of
which you want more. Plato's general conclusion is
that a small amount of pure pleasure is better than
a large amount of mixed pleasure. Consequently, he
commends even on purely hedonistic grounds the life
which is devoted to the pursuit of wisdom and beauty as
compared with that which is spent in seeking to satisfy
the desires.
Do WE EVER PURSUE PLEASURE AS AN END? If
it be granted that we can acknowledge motives for action
other than the motive of increasing our own pleasure, the
question may be asked whether we ever do act from the
motive which the psychological hedonist asserts to be our
sole motive? It seems doubtful. Hedonism assumes that
there is a special kind of mental event which it calls a
pleasure, and that it is at the production of this mental
event that we invariably aim. Now, a highly plausible
psychological view mwnfa*m that there are no such things
as pleasures and pains conceived as separate events occur-
ring in our psychological history; what we call pleasures
and pains are, it holds, always qualities of other events.
The subject is technical, and I cannot do more than
indicate a conclusion which it would be beyond the scope
of this book to defend. This conclusion is, broadly, that all
mental events are primarily forms of cognition; they are,
that is to say, ways of knowing something. Now most of
our "knowings" are characterized by a quality which
the psychologists know as emotional tone. Thus, if I see
a tiger and am frightened, I should be said to be knowing
or cognizing the tiger fearfully; if I see it behind the bars
of a cage and am interested in observing its movements,
I am cognizing it curiously. Now one of the qualities by
which my cognitions are characterized is the quality of
their hcdonic tone, that is to say, the degree of their
pleasurableness or painfulness. If, for example, I am
looking at a row of chocolates in a box in a shop window