alent of B's for food, and how much of one person's satisfaction is a set-off for how much of another person's disappointment. He must have a means of comparing the desires and disappointments of different men, and the general standard supplies him with none. Whatever means he may use will govern his decision; it will be according to that that he will decide and not according to the general standard. He may decide by trying to put himself in imagination in A's and B's place, and by considering whether his desire for hair-powder, if he were A, would be greater than his desire for food if he were B; or he may say bluntly at once, without any effort of imagination, that the desire for hair-powder is essentially a weighty one (or a frivolous one, according to his taste), and that the desire for food is the opposite. In either case he will be consulting his own feelings in the matter and not the general standard; he will be merging the general standard into his personal standard. His argument would run: that is good which is capable of affording anybody pleasure, that is better which would be capable of affording me more pleasure, if I were in other men's circumstances. Or he may decide by noticing the amount of energy which A and B, respectively, have put forth, and may reason : since A works harder for hair-powder than B would for food, A's desire is more than the equivalent for B's. But here the principle for decision is that might makes right,—an ancient and respectable principle, of which we shall have more to say by and by, but one which can hardly be deduced from the general standard. In effect, the instant you try to distinguish between desires, and between satisfactions and disappointments, and between people, that instant you become unable to move a step in accordance with the general standard, unless you are competent to take a thing which is good in one sense and not good in another, and a second thing which is good in a third sense and not good in a fourth, and decide which of these two things is on the whole the better. One who cannot do this must be contented to count desires and disappointments, and not weigh them.
It appears, then, that we are led not to one moral ideal, but
