"A debtor who cannot pay me offers to compound for his debt by making over one of sundry things he possesses--a diamond ornament, a silver vase, a picture, a carriage. Other questions being set aside I assert it to be my pecuniary interest to choose the most valuable of these, but I cannot say which is the most valuable. Does the proposition that it is my pecuniary interest to choose the most valuable, therefore, become doubtful? Must I not choose as well as I can, and if I choose wrongly must I give up my ground of choice? Must I infer that in matters of business I may not act on the principle that, other things equal, the more profitable transaction is to be preferred, because, in many cases, I cannot say which is the more profitable, and have often chosen the less profitable? Because I believe that of many dangerous courses I ought to take the least dangerous, do I make 'the fundamental assumption' that courses can be arranged according to a scale of dangerousness, and must I abandon my belief if I cannot so arrange them? If I am not by consistency bound to do this, then I am no more by consistency bound to give up the principle that the greatest surplus of pleasures over pains should be the end of action, because the 'commensurability of pleasures and pains' cannot be asserted." At the close of his chapters on empirical hedonism, Mr. Sidgwick himself says he does "not think that the common experience of mankind, impartially examined, really sustains the view that Egoistic Hedonism is necessarily suicidal;" adding, however, that the "uncertainty of hedonistic calculation cannot be denied to have great weight." But here the fundamental assumption of hedonism, that happiness is the end of action, is still supposed to involve the assumption that "feelings can be arranged in a certain scale of desirability." This we have seen it does not: its fundamental assumption is in no degree invalidated by proof that such arrangement of them is impracticable.