ness, murder is higher (as a crime) than larceny. You may speak of the height of goodness, badness, pleasure, pain, beauty, and ugliness. And so, when a man talks to us of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’, he says nothing to us at all, till we know what end or summit he has in his mind.
Again, higher and lower, as comparative terms, refer to degree. What is higher has a greater degree (or it has a greater number of degrees) of something definite; what is lower has a less degree or number of degrees. Their quality, as higher and lower, is referable to quantity.[1] So that apart from quantity, apart from degree, there is no comparison, no estimation, no higher and lower at all.
The result of these perhaps trivial considerations is that, if we are confined to mere quality, the words higher and lower have no meaning. If of two pleasures I can not say one is higher than the other in degree (as intenser), or as the result or producer of degree (as accompaniment of higher function, or as connected with approximation to some end), then the words higher and lower can not be applied to them. The sphere of mere quality is the world of immediate perception; and here we may say A or we may say B, but we can not make comparisons between A and B without leaving our sphere. I may take this and not that, I may choose that and not the other, but if, because of this and on the mere strength of this, I call one higher and one lower, I am not simply arbitrary and perhaps wrong in my opinion, but I am talking sheer and absolute nonsense.
To proceed then with one of our two views, (1) the theory which takes quality either as = intensive quantity, or as a means to quantity in general. The ‘higher pleasure’ is here the pleasure which contains in itself most degrees of pleasure, or which con-
- ↑ Speaking roughly and inaccurately, we may say they are of this quality, as containing more or fewer degrees of somewhat, or as the result of more or fewer degrees, or (what comes to the same thing) as producing a qualitative result which is referred to more or fewer degrees; e.g., a certain warmth is higher, because containing more degrees of objective heat; a piece of work is higher if it is the result of more skill; and A’s skill stands higher than B’s, if A produces a result which B can not produce, and if the result must be referred to the amount of skill in the performer.
