On the other hand he says: "The pleasure or pain that accompanies the acts must be taken as a test of character. He who faces danger with pleasure, or, at any rate, without pain, is courageous, but he to whom this is painful is a coward. Indeed we all more or less make pleasure our test in judging actions." Can we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory statements? Perfectly. On the one hand if we do an act simply for the pleasure it will give, without first asking how the proposed act will fit into our permanent plan of life, we are pretty sure to go astray. For pleasure registers the goodness of the isolated act; not the goodness of the act as related to the whole plan of life. Thus if I drink strong coffee at eleven o'clock at night, the taste is pleasant and the immediate effect is stimulating. But if it keeps me awake half the night and unfits me for the duties of the next day, in spite of the pleasure gained, the act is wrong. And it is wrong, not fundamentally because of the pains of wakefulness it brings; it is wrong because it takes out of my life as a whole, and my contribution to the life of the world, something for which the petty transient pleasure I gained at the moment of indulgence is no compensation whatsoever. Is not Aristotle right? Do we not pity as a miserable weakling, hardly fit to have been graduated from the nursery, any man or woman who will let the mere physical sensation of a few moments at the end of an evening count so much as the dust in the balance against the efficiency of the coming forenoon's life and work?