end, and for this all must be sacrificed. And so the question is, Is the negation of the part always a condition of the affirmation of the whole, or is it sometimes not? (And we should remember that the affirmation of the whole may be in the part, or without the part.) Can we ever say, Here is an overplus of the negative; here is negation of function, which, in itself and its results, is negation of the good, or of life as a whole? I do not see how we are to say this, because I do not see how we can know enough about the whole of things. For anything I can tell pain per se may be always an unreal abstraction, as I know it often is. What is bad for this or that relative totality may be good for a higher; and above the highest relative totality may be (for anything I know to the contrary) an absolute totality, in which and for which pain is the mere condition of affirmation and in no sense the diminution of life, but whose life (as I suppose all life) involves in itself a subordinated negation. This I do not assert to be the case; but I wished to point out that no man has a right to say pain is an evil absolutely, unless he knows that there is no such life of the whole, or that pain is a negative which limits its functions, and is not a negative condition of those functions.
To return from our digression. We have seen that pain is bad whenever it is not necessary as a condition of good. Turning now to pleasure, we ask, Is pleasure generally speaking good? Doubtless it is good. It is the felt assertion of the will or self. It is felt self-realizedness. It is good because it accompanies and makes a whole with good activity, because it goes with that selfrealization which is good; or secondly, because it heightens the general assertion of self, which is the condition of realizing the good in self.
Pleasure is the psychical accompaniment of exercise of function, and a distinction is required in order to think of function apart from some pleasure. Perhaps there is really no such thing. The function brings its own pleasure, however small, though the whole state may be painful.
Pleasure, then, is generally good; but the questions which now arise are, Can pleasure exist without function? If so, is it good? Or to put it otherwise; Are all pleasures of activity good? Are all pleasures of passivity good? Are any pleasures neither good nor bad? And finally, Is any pleasure good per se, or simply as pleasure?
Can pleasure exist without function? We could not enter here on a psychological investigation of the point, even were we able to treat the matter satisfactorily. But taking pleasure to be the feeling of the realizedness of the will or self, we should doubt if
