In a single word we here join issue. For the comparison in such a case is _constructive comparison_, not a mechanical measuring of fixed magnitudes, as the above objection tacitly assumes. And constructive comparison is essentially a transitive or inductive operation whereby the agent moves from one level to another, altering his standard of living in some more or less important way, embarking upon a new interest, entering upon the formation of a new habit or upon a new accession of power or effectiveness--making or seeking to make, in short, some transformation in his environment and in himself that shall give his life as an entire system a changed tenor and perspective. The term "constructive comparison" is thus intended, among other things, to suggest that the process is in the nature of adventure, not calculation, and, on the other hand, that though adventurous it is not sheer hazard uncontrolled. And the motive dominant throughout the process--the economic motive in its constructive phase--is neither more nor less than a supposition, on the agent's part, that there may be forthcoming for him in the given case in hand just such an "epigenetic" development of new significance and value as we have found actual history to disclose as a normal result of economic innovation. It is the gist of hedonism, in economic theory as in its other expressions, that inevitably the agent's interests and motives are restricted in every case to the precise range and scope of his existing tendencies and desires; he can be provoked to act only by the hope of just those particular future pleasures or means of pleasure which the present constitution of his nature enables him to enjoy. Idealism assumes that the emergent new interest of the present was wrapped up or "implied," in some sense, in the interests of the remote and immediate past--interests of which the agent at the time could of course be but "imperfectly" aware. Such differences as one can discern between the two interpretations seem small indeed--like many others to which idealism has been wont to point in disparagement of the hedonistic world view. For in both philosophies the agent is without initiative and effect; he is in principle but the convergence of impersonal motive powers which it is, in the one view, absurdly futile, in the other misguidedly presumptuous, to try to alter or control.