pleasure as well as pain that are opened up to a refined sensibility. According to Hartmann, the æsthetic sensibilities may be a source of painless pleasure: yet even their cultivation cannot be said to be matter of pure gain to their possessors; for the pain of discord is to be set against--in his opinion, it outweighs--the pleasure of harmony. On the whole, then, it would appear that the evolution of the individual leads to greater possibilities both of pleasure and of pain. The refinement of the intellectual and emotional nature opens up wider ranges of both kinds of feeling; and we are driven to look mainly to the improvement of the social environment for the means of increasing pleasure and diminishing pain. [Sidenote: social progress:] [Sidenote: industrial,] But to estimate the hedonistic value of social progress is a still more difficult task than the preceding. For the march of affairs has often little regard to its effect on the happiness of the greater number of people concerned. Industrially, it may be thought that the increase in the amount of wealth produced affords a vastly greater means of comfort and luxury. Yet, it is doubtful whether this increase has always been sufficient to keep pace with the growth of population; and it is certain that every society whose territory is limited, must, when its numbers have increased beyond a certain point, begin to experience the diminishing returns which nature yields for the labour expended upon it. Indeed, the tendency to an excess in the rate of increase of population over that of means of subsistence is one of the chief causes which make it so difficult to assert that civilisation tends to greater happiness. But, even although the average quantity of wealth be greater now than before, it must be remembered that wealth is measured by its amount, whereas happiness depends on the equality with which that amount is distributed.[173] Yet the present industrial _régime_ tends to the accumulation of immense wealth in a few hands, rather than to its proportionate increase throughout the community. The industrial progress which increases the wealth of the rich, has little to recommend it if it leaves the "labouring poor" at a starvation-wage. "And what if Trade sow cities Like shells along the shore, And thatch with towns the prairie broad With railways ironed o'er,"--