It follows, therefore, that, without adopting a pessimist view, we must still make our choice between evolutionism and hedonism. The course of evolution--so far as experience helps us to understand it--cannot be measured by increase of pleasure. Nothing is said here to show that it is not perfectly consistent to hold that the moral feelings and ideas, the customs to which they have given rise, and the institutions in which they are embodied, have been produced by the ordinary laws of evolution, and yet to maintain that the moral end for reflective beings is the hedonistic or utilitarian end. It may be possible, that is to say, to be an evolutionist in psychology and sociology, at the same time that one is a hedonist in ethics. But it is not allowable to adopt pleasure as the end, and yet speak of it as determined by evolution. Evolution can determine no such end until it be shown that the progress it connotes implies a proportionate increase of pleasure. Such is the conclusion to which we are led by a consideration of the bearings of evolution upon the increase of pleasure and pain. But this argument requires to be supplemented by the more satisfactory method of an independent analysis of pleasure in relation to the development of human nature; and from this analysis we may hope to discover how far the theory of evolution is consistent with the ethics of hedonism. * * * * * [Sidenote: 4. The psychological analysis of pleasure and pain in relation to the ethics of evolution.] The relative and transient nature of pleasure has been urged as an objection against any form of hedonism by many philosophers since the time of Plato. And the argument has of late years been brought forward in a way which shows that the calculus of "pleasures" and "pains" which Bentham's ethics implies is much less certain and easy than its author supposed. This has been made clear both by the subtle analysis carried out by the late Professor Green, and by Professor Sidgwick's examination of the difficulties which beset the "hedonistic calculus." It does not appear, however, to have been made out that the nature of pleasure proves hedonism to be impossible as the end of conduct. But it may, perhaps, appear that the case is altered when we consider the matter in the light of the evolutionist form of hedonism now under examination, and estimate from this point of view the ethical bearings of the psychological analysis of feeling. [Sidenote: (_a_) The purely subjective nature of pleasure;] [Sidenote: its connection with objective states of mind,] [Sidenote: through which it may be made the end of conduct.]