=Present Congeniality to Character Measures Importance.=--When we analyze what occurs, we find that this process of comparing future possible satisfactions, to see which is the greater, takes place on exactly the opposite basis from that set forth by Bentham. We do not compare results in the way of fixed amounts of pleasures and pains, but we compare _objective_ results, changes to be effected in ourselves, in others, in the whole social situation; during this comparison desires and aversions take more definite form and strength, so that we find the idea of one result more agreeable, more harmonious, to our present character than another. _Then_ we say it is more satisfying, it affords more pleasure than another. The satisfaction _now_ aroused in the mind at the thought of getting even with an enemy may be stronger than the painfulness of the thought of the harm or loss that will come to him or than the thought of danger itself,--then the pleasures to follow from vengeance are esteemed more numerous, stronger, more lasting, etc., than those which would follow from abstinence. Or, to say that satisfactions are about equal means that we are _now_ at a loss to choose between them. But we are not at a loss to choose because certain future pains and pleasures present themselves in and of themselves as fixed amounts irrespective of our own wishes, habits, and plans of life. Similarly we may speak of satisfactions being added to one another and the total sum increased; or of dissatisfaction coming in as offsets and reducing the amount of satisfaction. But this does not mean that pains and pleasures which we expect to arrive in the future are added and subtracted--what intelligible meaning can such a phrase possess? It means that as we think first of this result and then of another, the present happiness found in the anticipation of one is increased by the anticipation of the other; or that the results are so incompatible that the present satisfaction, instead of swelling and expanding as from one thought to another, is chilled and lessened. Thus we might find the thought of revenge sweet (and thus give a high valuation to the units of pleasure to result from it), but be checked by the thought of the meanness of the act, or of how we would feel if some one else, whose good opinion we highly esteem, should hear of it.